Courtesy of my ISP I had the chance to test my hub capabilities when without internet. Most of my devices are with edge drivers, so I thought most of my automations would work fine, but I was wrong. Even automations with the little house next to the title didn’t work because many of the devices (zigbee or zwave) were offline.
I noticed that the devices that were offline have as parent device one of the secondary hubs which led me to believe that only the devices connected to the primary hub will work offline as this is the hub with the edge driver installed.
Does anyone else with a Smartthings Wifi Mesh Router notice something similar? Do I’m missing something?
For me looks like we ST Wifi user got a bad end of this edge drivers deal by loosing groove, not being able to get to work LAN base edge drivers and that the best thing about the edge drivers which is working offline, is crippled for us.
That would make sense to me because the Samsung Wi-Fi mesh routers are one of the few Wi-Fi mesh models currently being sold where the Wi-Fi mesh itself only works when there is an active Internet connection. (Eero originally worked that way, but released an update a few years ago so that their Wi-Fi mesh now will work without the Internet.)
So, since the primary hub cannot communicate with the secondary without the Internet, it doesn’t surprise me if “local“ devices based on the secondary fail. But I don’t know for sure.
I wasn’t aware that there was such as thing as a secondary hub with SmartThings WiFi. I thought the primary was the one and only SmartThings hub and the others were just repeaters. Did things change or was I never correct?
They are zigbee and zwave repeaters, but apparently repeaters without an edge driver and therefore, repeaters that don’t work when the internet goes down.
They are only repeaters as far as Zigbee and z Wave.
But they are secondaries as far as the Wi-Fi mesh, where one is designated as the primary. So that’s what I was referring to. I probably should’ve called them “satellites“ to be clearer.
Oh, and this picture shows why they are cloud dependent: they utilize the Plume cloud to manage the Wi-Fi mesh:
I haven’t had a chance to test it, so I can’t say it’s that way for sure or not. However, when we could still see the Z-Wave routing in the IDE, my secondary hubs were often in the routing path between my ST enabled primary hub and an end device. That always led me to believe they served as Z-Wave repeaters and that the presence or absence of the Internet connection shouldn’t matter.
I don’t understand the OP’s comment about the devices on secondary hub being offline. There is only one Z-Wave/Zigbee hub in the Wi-Fi mesh version, so all Z-Wave/Zigbee devices should be homed to it. Only Wi-Fi devices show as “homed” to secondary hubs, so I’m not sure how he would determine that Z-Wave devices were homed to a secondary hub. When I query the ST CLI or the API Browser+, all my devices show their Parent as the same device ID.
In general, all devices will show offline when the Internet is down because the app, the CLI, and the API Browser+ rely on the API for status and the hub can’t report device status when it’s disconnected from the Cloud.
Additionally, the second generation of the Wi-Fi mesh products used the plume cloud to route traffic between the primary Wi-Fi hub and the satellites. So the Wi-Fi mesh itself doesn’t work when there’s no Internet access.
As far as whether there’s still a Z wave connection without the Internet between the primary and a secondary, I honestly don’t know, but I thought the primary itself basically doesn’t do anything when it can’t reach Plume. Maybe I’m wrong on that. It’s a very unusual architecture.
Sorry, I misuse the term parent device. In the API browser all my devices say that the parent device is the primary hub as well. What I meant was that the devices that were offline are the ones that I know use the secondary hubs as repeaters because they are in the same room and I remember seen the route on the IDE.
Ah, I see what you are saying. Unfortunately, once a device is converted to an Edge driver, there is no longer a way to see the routing since it’s not exposed in the API. We can’t be sure that those devices are still routing through the secondary hubs or not. Regardless, as I mentioned, all devices will show offline when your Internet is down since there is no communication path for the hub to report status or be queried.
Out of curiosity, are your secondary hubs different SmartThings locations than the primary hub location?
(I have two SmartThings WiFi hubs that are branded Vodafone; I got them on eBay knowing they were likely locked)
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Thank you Alejandro for following up on this, I just gave access. I’m very interested in solving this issue so if you or the team needs any further assistance from me please let me know and I’ll do my best.
