Google Home integration saying random lights are offline

Hi guys! I'm having a strange issue with Google Home integration. One room of my house has 10 bulbs -- and if I ask Google to turn off the lights in that room, it will do random things:

  • When I ask it to turn on the room's lights, it will say "Ok, turning on 2 ilghts, 8 lights aren't available."
  • It will actually turn on like 4 or 5 lights
  • If I ask it to turn on the lights in that room again, it will say something like "Ok turning on 6 lights, 4 aren't available."

The number of offline/online lights changes each time along with how many lights are actually controlled. If I ask it repeatedly eventually it'll control all 10 lights.

  • The lights work fine via Rule Engine/Scenes ... none of them are actually offline
  • I've adjusted the Device Poling in the Google Home app -- tried a few settings but that seemed to have no measurable effect.

PS: I've emailed support -- but thought maybe someone here had some tips
PPS: I'm also having that error when changing modes where it activates but says it's not available ... I saw that's a known issue.

Thanks!

I believe @mike.maxwell has finally identified a bug in the google home integration that may be a cause of this. If I understand correctly he's working on a solution, but I'll leave it to him to chime in on this.

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May be too soon to tell, but I had some Hue bulbs paired directly to Hubitat, so I have moved all Philips bulbs off Hubitat and onto the Hue Bridge .. and for now, it all seems to be working without any funny messages, Now I removed the Hue bulbs from the Zigbee mesh, it seems to have caused a bunch of sensors to stop working. (An expected result -- so time to repair those)

:slight_smile:

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They should find a new route on their own, but if you want to "help" you can remove the sensors battery and then re-insert. It should look for a new route when it powers back on. If all else fails, you can perform a reset on the sensors (don't remove it from HE) and then put HE back in discovery mode for a few seconds.

One of the above methods will get the sensors back online without too much fuss. Just be thankful that your not going to get a sudden loss of connectivity when your hue bulbs decided to drop the data randomly.

The Hue bulbs were routing those sensors, but bulbs (especially Hue) are terrible routers. Your setup will be much more stable without any bulbs attached directly to the hub so they don't try and route your other Zigbee devices. The only bulbs that have been identified to not route are Sengled, so they're not a problem to pair with the hub.

If you need inexpensive repeaters for your Zigbee devices, the IKEA Trådfri outlets seem to be working well.

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I do have a bunch of IKEA Tradfri bulbs connected -- are those terrible routers as well? It's only been since yesterday so we'll see, but things seem very stable at the moment now I removed all the Philips branded bulbs...

Some have said they work, but the evidence seems to point to all bulbs that can repeat are terrible repeaters for other devices. They work, then suddenly fumble. If you only have Zigbee bulbs and no other Zigbee devices, it seems to be no problem.

I have the Trådfri outlets repeating and that is working very well so far. When I experimented with adding a Trådfri bulb to the mix, it caused one of the outlets to drop the connection to the hub and I had to re-pair it and several Xiaomi devices. It also took several of my other devices offline that had never dropped a connection before.

As soon as I took the Trådfri bulb out of the mix, everything returned to normal. I had to pair several of the Xiaomi devices near the outlet again, and everything has been stable since.

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It would be an amazing feature (if it's even possible) if Hubitat could show us the Zigbee topology. Or at least if you could see if a particular device was connecting through another device.

My current setup is all the Philips bulbs are on the Hue Bridge, but all the Trådfri bulbs, GE bulbs and CREE bulbs are directly on Hubitat. So far zero issues and I have a ton of Xiaomi devices..... My house isn't that big though, so it's entirely possible every device can talk directly to HE.

The Google Home "offline" messages are still gone.

I don't really expect they will every provide something like that. That really is a diagnostic tool and they have been very clear they are focused on creating the best Home Automation hub available. I hope they continue to stay focused on creating great automation features. Mainstream consumers really wouldn't understand what they were looking at anyway.

I wouldn't expect a home router manufacturer to build a network analyzer into their routers either. Just too much development effort for an audience that largely wouldn't use it because they didn't know what to do with the information.

If you're really interested in what your Zigbee network is doing, an XBee is the way to go. It's around $55 US for everything you need.

While I agree a highly detailed analysis might not be useful to a regular user, having the ability to see this information in a diagnostic/support situation is useful. Having an unreliable overall system because of repeater issues is going to affect a regular user. They are likely to think that Hubitat is "crap" because Zigbee is unreliable. All caused by a misbehaving device on the network.

With Hue, they avoid this by just not allowing problematic/unsupported devices to join.

From a "Regular user" argument, I feel that a Hubitat is the least "regular user" friendly of any system I've used. (Outside of OpenHAB) This isn't a knock from a capability standpoint.

I feel like Hue is the easiest most novice compatible, SmartThings is next (if you stay out of the IDE and don't use any custom drivers or apps) and then Hubitat. So since Hubitat seems to be best for more advanced users, some diagnostic tools would be help.

I know Zigbee isn't the same as TCP/IP, but it's not that complex for a regular computer user to use "traceroute" to do some simple testing. Hubitat already tells me about the signal strength and link quality for the last hop... so it doesn't seem a reasonable ask to see if at least a device is communicating directly to HE or going through a router. [[I know nothing about how IEEE 802.15.4 works so I don't know how possible this even is with the hardware available.]]

This is probably the same problem that Alexa has. I did some packet sniffing here...

I'm experiencing the same thing with Google Home and Alexa for all my HE connected devices. Here's a couple example of what I'm seeing:

  • If I log into alexa.amazon.com all my HE connected devices show as (Offline) while my Hue, Ecobee, Blink and Ring all report online.

  • My Hue bridge/bulbs connected via Hubitat to Alexa or Google Home often show Offline and have trouble maintaining the current device state while the same bulbs connected via the Hue skill always show online and the correct state.

I believe the issue has something to do with Alexa and Google Home cloud services having to "reach" into our home network and ping the HE hub to get the state of devices. I'd be really curious to trace the handshaking that's occurring.