Samsung Connect Hub seems to be bricked

The past 3 days, my Samsung Connect Hub ([SAMSUNG-ET-WV520) has been unresponsive, blinking light, shows as offline in my Xfinity hub. At first, some “local” events worked (closet sensor), but app control was gone showing it as offline. Now it is just blinking red/green. Weirdly, it seems to come online very briefly at night- the past few nights I have awakened to see all the lights in the house on at 3 or 4am. I have to get up and manually turn them all off. This is maddening. Was the Connect part of the hub update and did it possibly brick it?

Some preface- since last winter, the hub has been acting weird. For a few months I got notifications that my hub was offline, then online, then offline, etc… throughout the day, but local routines still worked. Then it seemed to stabilize.

And one other thing- this hub has NEVER been completely stable. From Day 1, it would lock up about once a month and need to be reset. I finally plugged the hub into an old-fashioned plug-in timer to power cycle it in the middle of the night. Before that, I would have to try to remember to reset the hub before I went out of town as several times, the hub locked up while I was gone with lights either in on or off state and nothing I could do about it.

I’ve been a long time user of ST since 2014 with a previous hub before this one.

If you have an Ethernet cable connecting this to your network, make sure that it’s plugged into the “In” port and not the out.

It is on the IN port- nothing has changed and I did not unplug the ethernet cable from its current port. It was working fine before 3 days ago. I’ve been using this hub since around 2015-16 timeframe. It is direct connected to the Xfinity hub, sitting right next to it.

8/9 years (70.000 hours) old? That’s retirement age for most electronic devices.

Those Aeotec hubs not that expensive…

Yes, I know it’s old. I would still like to get as much out of it as I can- if they are updating the firmware, they are still supporting it. I don’t look forward to migrating all those devices to a new hub and basically setting everything back up again. Was curious if anyone has had older hubs bricked with the new firmware rollout.

The fact that it is sporadically still turning on lights despite being offline is puzzling. Basically it is processing latent triggers at much later times. SmartThings platform had this problem across the board back in 2014 after Samsung acquired them and they scaled too fast that their servers couldn’t keep up with the Gen 1 hub (no local processing back then). Lots of people had delayed triggers with lights coming on in the middle of the night for a while.

the current hub firmware rollout does not include the Connect hubs.

did you reach out to Support?

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Easy to find out here:

https://my.smartthings.com/advanced/hubs

But in your case, the hardware is getting old. Amazingly, the Ethernet adapter often gives up first, but with very obscure symptoms. And there’s the internal storage that gets corrupted, especially when you power cycle it every 24 hours.

I very rarely power cycle (unplug) the hub, maybe twice in its lifetime so far. What I do every six weeks or so is to reboot it through the aforementioned interface.

I haven’t reached out to support- it has firmware 000.052.00021 according to the Dashboard. I’ll probably suck it up and buy the new one and re-pair. I actually have a spare Connect hub, but given its propensity to lock up, I’m not keen on it. It always seems to have been a flawed hub- hence the need for the external timer. Updating will also get me Matter support for eventual, future upgrades.

Maybe the online/offline cycling it has periodically been going through has been a gradually failing ethernet, though I’d think it would be all or nothing- it works one day, then doesn’t (like apparently now has happened). But it’s been super flaky most of this year.

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You probably know that there’s a relatively new feature that makes it easier to replace a hub:

Not 100% sure that your hub is supported though.

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it isn’t supported

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Wow, that’s cool they are finally offering that. But with my hub currently appears to be fubarred, I wonder if it would work (even if the model was supported).

Yes… if a support hub dies…you would be able to get a new one and replace with the last backup of that dead hub.

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