It already is showing some of the Wiz bulbs as offline again, while remaining on, so there's definitely something goofy with the communication between Wiz and Hubitat, but despite that the functionality is still currently good.
Ok so i am going to make a strange suggestion for wiz but hear me out on this.
- Uninstall the Wiz app so it is fully uninstalled.
- Remove each wiz device.
- Do a full reboot of the hub (shut down gracefully and then remove power from the wall.
- Install the Wiz app again and enable discovery once the hub has restarted and settled down.
- After the discovery has completed and a few min have passed, Restart the hub again.
I know it seems like allot but I am just thinking about what i worked with when the built in Wiz integration was released
What kind of wifi is it. Do you have a wifi mesh with a few nodes to cover your entire house, or do you have single router with high power stuff. Where are the bulbs relative to the hub.
The reason I am sticking to this is that I believe the built in integration uses UDP to talk to the bulb. UDP unlike TCP is a fire and forget it communication protocol. It just doesn't have the same transmission control options as TCP so it is possible your hub is sending the packet out over the network and once it hits the router the broadcast packet just isn't getting to the bulb. Reliability could be masked by your router for if most of them use TCP which will do a better job ensuring every packet sent is actually received by it's destination. When you use stuff like the Wiz App it is likely using TCP and talking to the wiz cloud.
As I said above, I have bulbs that show offline but work OK. Sometimes it takes a second or 2 for all 3 to light up, but it's manageable. They're outside and have bad RSSI (according to the Hubitat debug logs they're at least -86). So 'offline' is not sufficient to cause failure.
I have all my bulbs set up with DHCP reservations so that IP address issues can be ruled out as causing issues.
This thread is now so long, I don't remember if @user4745 stated that the bulbs are working from the device or Group device pages. That's a place to test (maybe again?). Start with the individual device and move on to the group.
This is true. Unlike their brethren Hue bulbs, which do work locally via their app.
The Wiz bulbs are great because they are local when using this integration though.
This is really a difference between Wifi and Zwave/Zigbee right. Wifi is a start topology network with the router in the middle. So as the devices move further from it more problems can occur, construction makes this worse. Zwave/Zigbee are mesh so as long as you have decent connections to devices near by they can route through other devices of a similar network.
Generally this isn't a disadvantage for wifi though as it tends to have a much stronger radio then the other two.
It's a Netgear Nighthawk RAX45 with 802.11AX. Single router, no mesh network, 1100 sq ft single level condo. The bulbs that were forgotten during the last round of "oops Hubitat forgot these bulbs" and "OK I'll add them back in again" were in various parts of the condo, not just like only the ones at the farthest reaches or anything like (but even if it were localized to only the farthest away bulbs, I've never had connectivity issues before, it's a small condo, signal is reliable and fast). The 2.4ghz network has its own SSID and password to avoid any issues with like the router trying to reassign a devices access to the 5ghz network or whatever else could feasibly happen in that regard. The bulbs that end up showing (offline) in the Wiz Integration app also do not change their status or show anything different when in the router itself and viewing the attached devices. Checking network health within the router also does not show any issues with connectivity/speed/collisions etc. I'm not sure about TCP and UDP and all that, if you tell me how to check that, I will. I didn't see anything like that in going through my router settings.
Yeah some of them are currently showing as (offline) but still maintain functionality at the moment. The problem is, or at least has been, that sometimes when the status changes from good to (offline) it actually loses its room association as well, so its a bit more of an issue than what is being displayed in the Wiz Integration app (who cares what's displayed so long as the functoinality remain, right? Well, I'm sure the developer does, because if they're anything like me they probably want it to just work perfectly. But at least for now it's still working despite showing (offline) for some). So, currently good and functional, but still in a testing period to see if it remains that way.
I've been diving into my router settings as well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "DHCP reservations." I DO see that "Use router as DHCP server" is checked/selected, and I do have a reserved IP address I put in place for the HE C8, but I have not done the same thing for each Wiz bulb, however. But I also have not seen/observed any given Wiz bulb display with anything but the same IP address. I even made an Excel spreadsheet last night with each Wiz bulb name, IP address, and MAC address in different columns for quick reference instead of having to go dig them out of the router settings if for some reason I needed to know (which actually has REALLY come in handy with how many times I have renamed Wiz bulbs in HE away from the generic "Wiz bulb on X.XXX.XX.XX" thing to the specific bulb name I've given each physical bulb in the Wiz iOS app, just for consistencies' sake.
They are all currently working as expected. I had gone so far as to compare each and every parameter setting across the collection of switches to make sure they were all uniformly set up the same as the switch in the Office (which WAS working correctly), and after verifying they all had the exact same parameters the switches/bulb commands outside of the Office STILL weren't working so I just excluded/re-included the switches, deleted/re-added the bulbs, and started the whole thing from scratch and they are currently functioning as expected with 1)built-in Wiz Integration app (despite the showing offline issue thing), 2) the Groups and Scenes app to group bulbs together, 3) the Basic Button Controllers app with (for now) just 2 commands programmed in, the tap up to turn bulb group on, one tap down to turn bulb group off. With all that in place the logs show consistent and similar entries across the 3 different switches which are the focus right now, so we're in a good spot currently. There's more that I want to do with it, but I'm letting the system ride as is for awhile to see if it maintains.
Well 1100 sq ft isn't much to cover, but the fact you mention this is a condo does add something interesting. I would imagine you are surrounded by 2.4ghz radios if you do a simple wifi scan correct.
TCP vs UDP isn't something you can check. It is a characteristic of how the packet is sent between devices. TCP has allot of correction stuff around it to ensure communication. UDP does not to improve throughput.
Here is my suspicion. You may be so overloaded with 2.4ghz networks around your condo that your router is really fighting constantly to maintain connectivity and for the most part it does. But because the router is getting stepped on so much by nearby routers some UDP packets that don't have the same transmission control stuff that TCP has get lost.
My suggestion would be to try to look back through the forums and see if you can find the community created Wiz bulbs ingtegration. I believe that driver used TCP instead of UDP to talk to the bulbs. See if that makes a difference.
I would MUCH prefer a Zigbee or Zwave bulb architecture, but as a full time student I'm already kind of stretching the budget just implementing this type of stuff, so I'm trying to make the cheaper alternatives work maximally. The other thing with the Hues, although more reliable and less of a hassle, I don't think I have even seen a 1600 lumen RGBW from them. (And now that I Google a little harder I do see an option out there, for $65 each. Yikes. I got my Wiz 1600lm RGBW for $17 each. That's just a gulf I can't cross.)
I had that driver installed as of this morning actually, but just wiped all remnants of it entirely to try and ensure that it wasn't conflicting somehow with the built-in one. I'll probably let the system ride as is and see how it performs, and if it starts having issues again (which, I honestly dont think it will, I think it might be ironed out now) then either do like you said with removing all traces of the Wiz app and bulbs, reboot the hub, etc.
Or
if that fails then perhaps wipe again and experiment with just the community driver installed instead of the built-in. But for now, fingers crossed there aren't any hangups.
I mention this because one feature that is an absolute must for me is the maximum amount of lumens that I can feasibly get. I swapped out my bathroom vanity light from a 3 fixture to a 4 fixture for this reason. Light therapy is one of the main ways I manage my insomnia without medication, which is why I'm so....like....adamant about these Rhythms and consistency and automaticity and such because light is a big part of managing my sleep issues. I just now for the first time 2 weeks ago saw that Wiz actually has a 150W equiv RGBW bulb now (would have just bought a bunch of those if they were around when I started buying all my 100W 1600lm bulbs)
Every computer on a network be it internet, home lan, wifi has a IP address. The computer get that IP address one of 2 ways. Either you set it on the device, or they talk to a DHCP server(can be built into router). A DHCP reservation is when you tell a DHCP server this ip address is reserved to this device. So providing a DHCP reservation would be when you go into your router and tell it's DHCP server that x device gets x.x.x.x ip address.
ALSO, I know this thread is super long, and I want to give one huge shoutout to EVERYONE for chiming in and helping. Not only me, but hopefully it provides a roadmap for anyone else wanting to implement it.
Are you suggesting that I go in and tell the DHCP server each Wiz bulbs current IP address to lock them in then?
It may help.
The reason is when a device gets a IP Address is assigned a lease time. Like 6 or 12 hours or something like that. When that time is up it is possible the router will give it a new IP Address. That can cause little communication hiccups if you happen to try to connect to the device and not get the update Ip address. If you force it to always give the same ip then that will never happen.
Sounds good. Will do. Thanks!
One last thing I will point out because of post above about lumens.
Be careful about putting to much merit in that. There really isn't anything regulating how that number is derived. So just because one bulb or lamp says it produces 1500 lumens may not mean it is brighter then something rated at 1200 most of the time or even for particular color temps.
The wiz bulbs are cheap and it is why I have 6 of them myself. Most of them are the 60 Watt equivalent, and one 75 watt equivalent. They are ok but their high lumen number clearly prefer certain Color temps and have nothing to do with color brightness. If i remember right as well their CRI is alright but not great.
I don't really have any alternatives but just a word of caution about those comparisons.
You're spot on on that. There is definite variation from brand to brand, and from color temp to color temp within the same bulb with luminance. But these 1600 Wiz ones were brighter than any other RGBW I've had in the house (which were all 800 lumen bulbs). I certainly would not bet a dime that the A21 ACTUALLY puts out 1600, I'm just meaning I want the greatest number of lumens I can get, and with (at the time) nobody else offering a 1600 lumen option, she was the brightest to get in the wifi RGBW world. Even just my standard Feit daylight 1600 lumen bulbs are noticeably brighter, but that was a tradeoff I was willing to pay to have RGBW and be able to dial things back in terms of both color temp AND luminance for circadian rhythm purposes. As many issues as Wiz has posed, she's still been worth the low cost, but there are definitely better options out there.
Hue for one, but I found the A-21 Hue color bulbs on sale at Lowe’s around a year ago when the local Lowe’s was trimming down their Hue selection. I definitely wouldn’t recommend paying the current price of $65 a piece. Not a knock on the bulbs, just the price.
Oh for sure. But even a sale price of $50 each is just not even in the same conversation as $17 each, especially when considering it's a whole new architecture, AND another $40 hub, etc. Better quality, I'm sure. But I don't see it being a better value. I currently have 14 bulbs in my condo, and 8 other bulbs are still dumb that could in theory but upgraded to RGBW but I haven't even justified the Wiz cost to do those ones, much less another $750+ to swap out to Hue
