Zigbee stability

Just an update. I’ve had a few more devices lock up over time and as if by magic @vlad from support has experienced it in his own system now. (somehow my issue has spread to him :wink:). Hopefully our findings will help create fixes in the future to increase stability.

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I seem to have stumbled onto the root cause of my smartthings and orvibo sensors dropping off or freezing. Moving all but 2 of my osram bulbs from being directly connected to smartthings onto the hue bridge instead has finally stopped my ST and orvibo sensors freezing and dropping off.
Since osram bulbs are officially supported I hope smartthings eventually fix this. It looks like the bulbs are occasionally deciding to act as poor quality repeaters causing g general flakiness.
I went from needing to reset 1 or 2 sensors every day to complete stability for 2 weeks.

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I wish I would have seen this discussion earlier, because I had exactly the same problem with Zigbee reliability a few months back. I don’t have a hue bridge, so I just removed all my Osram bulbs completely from ST. Ever since my Zigbee reliability has been rock solid.

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Thank you both for posting this today. Just found two Osram bulbs that I haven’t been using and was literally getting ready to put them back in ST. @a4refillpad

@johnconstantelo & @a4refillpad do you guys have any GE links in ST, I have finally replaced all of my GE with Hue on the Hue hub but kept two GE PAR 38s, which I brought back to ST after almost a year. I hope I don’t end up with Osram like issues now…

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Yup, I have 2 Daylights that have had zero problems since day 1, and 9 soft whites. The soft whites use to have problems, but I can honestly say I haven’t seen an issue with these for some time. We use Minimotes and Alexa for those bulbs, and nobody in my family has complained about bulbs not working. Knock on wood…

Seriously, I went from crap to great almost immediately after removing the Osram bulbs. I worked with ST’s zigbee guru, and we spent many hours on phone calls and a conference call diagnosing every element of my environment.

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I’ve been asked by @vlad to raise tickets to help support push thus to be fixed. So think it’s worth others doing the same to help.
Personally I think 1 or 2 bulbs don’t cause much of an issue. However as you increase the number stability just becomes rubbish. I had over a dozen and was seriously close to my wits end with smartthings and was thinking about leaving.

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I only had 2 Osram bulbs, and both were less than 20 feet from the hub. As soon as I removed them from ST my problems with many other zigbee devices crawled to a stop in less than a day.

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Yes that’s probably the worst location for them. One hop away from the hub. Possibly a lot of devices using them as the last hop before hitting the hub :cold_sweat:

So… there are definitely routing issues with the OSRAM bulbs, and we have new firmware from OSRAM that addresses this. However, ZigBee OTA firmware updates are still in the works and I don’t have a timeline for that feature. The firmware update we have doesn’t address all of the routing issues, but it should help. We continue to work closely with OSRAM to chase down the remaining bugs, but I just wanted to let you guys know that we are aware of this issue and we understand how important it is.

Probably sound like a broken record, here, but we’re working on fixing it.

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Thanks @csuk, that’s what I was also told by another person. I have an Osram hub that I can use to update the firmware, so is the firmware you have the same one Osram just released through their hub?

ref:

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I can’t say for sure if the OTA update from the LIGHTIFY bridge is the exact same one that we have, so I’ll attempt to summon @tpmanley to verify

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It would be interesting to see if your test devices have the same latest updates from Lightify as we do. I believe all the lights are on firmware 01020492 in the US.

I dont know if i’d call this directly tied to Osram. Unless somehow all my devices meshed to some very far out Osram devices. I was/am primarily Cree’s and had the same instability with controlling the bulbs. And there’s at least 1 other that had the same issue mostly Cree’s.

As for my Osram devices, they were all purchased from Amazon and never updated, so as they came out of the box. I dont have a lightify gateway to even do the updates.

20 Cree bulbs
1 osram grb gardenspot
2 osram rgbw led strips
1 osram rgbw can light retrofit light

It’s taken months of pain and investigation including support time to come to this conclusion. I think smartthings should actively discourage customers connecting osram bulbs directly until this is fixed. It seriously ruins the stability of zigbee devices as you increase the number of devices to the point that you want to rip out the entire system due to the number of stuck sensors it causes.

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I think Cree uses the same ZigBee stack - so they would also be affected by this issue.

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Yea I was right there with @a4refillpad . I was ready to give up on ST. I was actively telling friends to dump the system. At least 2 months of the nightly dance of trying to turn off all the lights in the house from my bed. I had just started to accept it.

Then finally opened a support ticket only to get “we cant reproduce it” or “we dont have a way to reproduce the issue”. Go take 300-400 dollars and buy 20 Cree or osram bulbs… Pair them. Then just try to turn them off. I got the run around of ‘can you reboot the hub’, ‘can you delete and add the bulb’, or ‘its possibly interference’. Each time proving the issue was not any of these… Luckly I am single and live alone, so doing things like laying a cat5 across the livingroom to put the hub in the most central location with 0 interference around it… I bought 300 dollars in smart outlets trying to ‘improve the mesh’ only to have the same instability.

As I said in my main thread, I understand we are outliers. That the average customer has 15 things or fewer… That by definition we are power users… Still yet, if the power users get frustrated what about mom and pop, or what about us telling others how great…or how bad the system is. We are a small subset, barely a blip on Samsung’s radar at this point. I just know I grew very tired trying to do basic troubleshooting that shouldn’t make it out of the QA lab

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We do have the same 01020492 firmware images that are available through the Lightify hub and are testing these images internally right now. I believe that the firmware mentioned above is for the Lightify hub itself.

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I was already on the latest version firmware update from lightify and still had all the problems mentioned. I’ve done the testing for you in effect. I can confirm it’s definitely no good.

In discussions with engineering in regards to the zigbee implementation in the Osram bulbs, apparently the bulbs can only queue 7 relayed packets at any one time. This would explain why in larger set-ups that stability issues can occur as the bulbs become overloaded and unable to relay everything passed to them.

I don’t know if the same applies to other zigbee bulbs but I guess it might be similar. Until a formal fix is found I would continue avoiding adding these bulbs directly.

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Check if Zigbee and Wifi have interference on 2.4 GHz band on this web page.
http://ostgardh.se/wifi_zigbee/index.html