Smartthings + 2 Hue bridges

Devices & Integrations
1

Hi,

Question for the community as Smartthings support suggest it may be possible but isn’t advised.

I have two Hue hubs because i’m unable to complete the mesh around my house. One hub is connected to my Sky modem. One is connected to one of my Linksys Velop nodes.

The one connected to my Sky hub is visible to Smartthings and I’m able to operate all the bulbs, integrate them into routines, scenes, CORE etc. The one connected to my Velop node isn’t visible. I’ve previously spoken to support about this and now know why the Velop Hue bridge isn’t visible but thought I’d see if anything is possible through the community.

So information isn’t second hand I’ll paste what Smartthings support have said.

Unfortunately, your use of the Linksys Velop Node to extend the range of your network is exactly the kind of thing that I was talking about, when I suggested what could be causing the problem. Whilst I understand that this may suit the purposes of your own network, connecting the the Hue Bridge that is in your living room, via this node, is not something we recommend when using it as part of Smart Things and I do think this is why you are having problems with the connection.

If you wish to continue using the secondary Hue bridge, via Smart Things, you will have to look at whether there is a way to bring this closer to your primary router (or use a very long Ethernet cable), so the connection runs directly through this, otherwise I fear you may continue to have these kinds of problems.

Exploring this more around the reasons why.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any tweaks specifically but I would encourage you to check the SmartThings Community page and see if any of our global users have any suggestions which may be helpful to you.

It has a lot to do with general signal strength and maintaining a strong, reliable and robust infrastructure for your devices to work on. The problem with using nodes and boosters is that by extending the network in this fashion, you then create a section that can easily drop out or lose signal after a period of time, when not in use. Even if the SmartThings hub could see this initially, you would find that it would end up being very intermittent and ultimately frustrating.

I’m taken Smartthings’ advice and seeking some help via the community. Has anyone been in this situation before? Have a workaround etc?

2

I haven’t tried this so I have NO CLUE whether it will work, but I am confident it might.

Get some Netgear Orbis. The reason I say this is the Orbis have a dedicated back channel that is always connected wirelessly. In theory, since you aren’t competing for bandwidth on 5 and 2.4 GHz it should provide a stronger connection.

Again this is theory and may not work at all… but I think it is worth a shot.

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3

Since you had said you have a sky modem, are you in the UK? Or the US?

The net gear orbi is available in both regions, but not all devices are, so I just wanted to check on that.

Also, am I correct in assuming that you mean the hue bridge? There is no Hue “hub” device. I know no one cares about this but me, so feel free to ignore the following. :wink: But I did just want to make sure that we were talking about the same thing.

4

All of that said, I don’t think what support told you really is what the problem is that you’ve run into. It’s not about signal strength. I think it has to do with superLAN connect where you have to be on the same LAN branch because the Hue bridge itself isn’t using WiFi at all.

The hue bridge doesn’t connect to your network by Wi-Fi. It has to be cabled to your ethernet router. If you’ve cabled it to one of your nodes , it may well be invisible to the ST hub.

There was a Bridge firmware update in late November in the US that was supposed to specifically help address this issue for Wi-Fi mesh network’s. But it was only available for the V2 version of the hue bridge. So I suppose we should stop and ask now if you have the round bridge or the square bridge.

Firmware 1711151408 (Bridge V2)
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Bridge V1 = Round-shape bridge
Bridge V2 = Square-shape bridge (support Apple HomeKit)
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Nov 27, 2017
Firmware 1711151408 (Bridge V2)
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Better discovery of bridge in networks with Wi-Fi mesh routers

Assuming you do you have the square bridge, make sure that its firmware is up-to-date. You can check in the hue app.

5

To test the theory. Just bring both bridges to one router and see if that’s a go.

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