Sometimes when i open the Smartthings app; i see the lights in my office (and only those, no other lights in the house ever get this stubborn) go to “Not connected” (The little depressed cloud icon). Then after a while they come back like nothing has ever happened (Could take minutes… or an hour)…
(I edited your title because “offline” and “disconnected” are actually two different things on the SmartThings platform.)
Welcome to the famous “off-line bug.“
“Online“ has a very specific meaning in smartthings: it means that the device has checked in with smartthings. If it goes too long without checking in, which can happen for any of many different reasons, smart things marks it as being “off-line“ even if it isn’t. This is why your automations still work – – when a message is sent to the Hue bulb, it acts on it.
We need to ask a couple of questions before narrowing in on what might be causing this for you.
do you have a smartthings hub, and if so, which model?
if you do have a hub, are you using the cloud to cloud integration or the bridge to hub integration? (If you don’t have a ST hub, you would have to be using the cloud to cloud integration.)
Or do you have the bulbs connected directly to a smartthings hub, not using the hue bridge?
how often are these lights used? Every day? A couple of times a week? Less frequently (like, say, a light in a guestroom closet)?
Once we know those answers, we should have a better idea of what’s going on.
Also, if you want to know why an automation will try sending a message to a device even if it’s marked off-line and the app itself will not, they’ve never told us that answer. It’s just one of the grand mysteries of smartthings design.
Yes, bridge to hub is more reliable, although I don’t know if it’s more reliable in terms of the off-line bug.
@jkp should know how to check which version of the Hue integration you are using, the app doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t support voice navigation very well.
Yes between the bridge and the hub, but you know the smartthings app always requires the Internet, right? So you won’t be able to test anything in the app and see a difference.
What you can do is set up a routine so that physically turning on one local device turns on another and then that would work.
OK… I have no clue if what I am about to bring up is correct…
open the hue bridge in the ST app, click on the 3 dots in the upper right of the screen and select Information. Mine says Connected to Home hub and I use the direct connection.
login to IDE at https://account.smartthings.com go to the Devices section and find your Hue bridge. My device type displays "LAN Hue Bridge " and if you open the device… the data section shows port 443 which I assume is the local connection from the hub.
I bet the cloud-to-cloud integration would display Placeholder but since I do not use that, I can not verify.
remove the linked service for Hue and that will remove all the hue lights. Please note: any scenes or Routines or other smartapps such as webcore will lose that data and would need to be added back or if it is the only device in a Routine… that Routine will be deleted so you may want to keep track of any Routines with hue lights just in case.
And what steps do i take to make sure the new linked service is direct instead of cloud to cloud?
I still do want to keep my Hue bridge in play so i can use the Hue app in some cases. Or is the only way to make it direct adding all the lights directly to the ST hub and not using the hue bridge?
