I have two Wemo bulbs that I’ve been using in my living room for the past 8 months. My smartthings hub is in the adjacent room/office. After the latest update, the bulbs were uncontrollable with Amazon Echo or the smartthings app (iPad and Samsung phone).
I removed and reset the bulbs then re-added them. When I did this, I took a long Ethernet cable and brought the smartthings hub into the living room to pair them. The bulbs again worked as advertised.
So, I brought the hub back into the office and I’m back to not being able to control the bulbs. It seems like if the hub is in the same room, they work. It hasn’t been like this the last 8 months and I have no idea why it just started. The distance from the hub while in the office to the closest lamp is 8-10 feet through one interior wall. The other one is about 20-25 feet.
This morning, both lights are unresponsive to the app or alexa, I got a long ethernet cable and brought the smartthings hub into the living room and they automatically connected back up. Everything works as advertised when the hub is in the room/has line of sight with the bulbs. I brought the hub back around the corner into the office and they’re back to not working again.
I just don’t get it. They’ve been working just fine for the past 8 months. Nothing new has been added or changed.
I would say that although nothing has changed in your setup, something in the environment has changed. Some king of radiated energy most likely is causing interference. It may be new Wi-Fi from a neighbor, it may be unusual radiated energy from power lines. The environment surrounding you can and will from time to time cause problems with any sort of low power RF communications.
I’m sure that’s very frustrating. Some people have reported that after the firmware update, the setting in the IDE for over the air (OTA) updates for zigbee devices had changed, and now appears to be defaulting to on instead of defaulting to off. The timing could be coincidental since there were a number of other problems yesterday that staff said were unrelated to the firmware update.
Anyway…
If a zigbee device thinks it is about to receive an OTA update, but that update never comes, it can leave the device unresponsive. A number of people had this problem specifically with zigbee bulbs when the OTA feature was first introduced.
So this may not have anything to do with what you’re seeing, but my first suggestion would be to go into the IDE and turn off OTA updates for bulbs and see if that helps.
It should be under hubs, then utilities, then zigbee utilities.
You might have to reset the individual bulbs after changing the parameter in the IDE in order to get them back to normal operations, but I would first try just changing the update parameter, then cutting the power on the bulbs for a few minutes and then turning them back on and seeing if control has been restored.
On the other hand, if OTA updates was already turned off, then that doesn’t have anything to do with the problem you’re seeing. It was just my first thought when you described the problem.
In either case, I would definitely report the issue to support:
Some people have reported that after the firmware update, the setting in the IDE for over the air (OTA) updates for zigbee devices had changed, and now appears to be defaulting to on instead of defaulting to off. The timing could be coincidental since there were a number of other problems yesterday that staff said were unrelated to the firmware update.