I bought a back of Sylvania A19 bulbs, and they are not connecting to the Hubitat at all. Not sure if I bought the wrong ones or not. Here is the link to them. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088G2B48D/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_5?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1
Can anyone tell me what might be the issue? I do have the Zigbee channel set to 20 as a lot of people here say switching to that channel has helped connectivity issues.
The bulbs you linked aren’t Zigbee; they’re WiFi. I would return them and order the Zigbee version.
Thank you, I figured I made a mistake and bought something that wasn't going to work. Thanks for the quick reply.
I would recommend Lifx over those. They have superior color matching and brightness. That said the sylvania I believe are ZLL based zigbee. If you have other devices (sensors, etc) they will not play nice as they are bad repeaters/messengers. They should be isolated to their own hub (either another Hubitat or a Hue bridge) if you need to use them. Personally I use switches over bulbs. I only use bulbs for the occasional table lamp (and then a pico on a pedestal to manually control it. )
The older ones are ZHA1.2, and the newer ones are zigbee 3.0. The issue with the older ones is they had insufficient RAM to maintain a proper routing table.
Damn you and your superior knowledge !!! I keep forgetting you're the bulb guru...
That would be @Ken_Fraleigh. I think it @Tony who pointed out why they function poorly as repeaters - and I may have mangled his explanation somewhat.
That was true with the Osram manufactured ones that were zll and updated to zha, but not any of the Ledvance manufactured ones, which were always ZHA 1.2 (which initially had promises of firmware updates to 3.0 that didn’t materialize).
In fact, all of the Ledvance bulbs that I have purchased over the years, sans one gardenspot light, came with the original zha firmware that ends in either 90 or 100.
Only due to pain and suffering inflicted by the mix of Osram bulbs and overheating Ledvance A-19 bulbs. That was such a fun way to start my HA experience. If it wasn’t Osram dropping packets it was the Ledvance Zigbee radio completely shutting down due to overheating. For a while I had rules to keep lights from dimming higher than 90% to keep them functioning. I finally replaced all of the A-19s with Hue, but never had any problems with the recessed can lights in 4 years and still would recommend them and the high output version.
TL;DR: Maybe the origin of the 'bulb=bad repeater' and 'ZLL doesn't work with ZHA' truisms are related to early Zigbee bulb firmware issues. Happy to be informed otherwise if that is the not the case.
ZLL/ZHA compatibility is an interesting topic (at least to me, lol). Looking at the documentation I'm inclined to believe that firmware bugs in early Zigbee bulbs may be the cause of most issues.
Based on the specs I've looked at, ZHA and ZLL were designed to be compatible at the network level; from what I gather the differences don't prevent a ZLL device (even a bulb acting as router) from fully participating in a ZHA network.
The differences in the profiles (documented here: ZLL Fundamentals) relate to how devices form and join networks (touchlink vs. classical commissioning) and certain ZLL commands that aren't part of ZHA: there are differences in the initial network key exchange(ZHA uses only the pre-defined trust center key of the coordinator; ZLL can use one of 3 pre-defined keys or fall back to a trust center); ZLL devices are considered 'address assignment capable' and can have different address fields in command frames than ZHA devices.
All that said, a ZLL device is fully capable of joining (and participating as a router in) a ZHA network since there aren't any differences at the network layer to cause issues when used as a repeater. Note that ZHA devices cannot (and aren't designed to) join ZLL networks.
Furthermore the caveats in the mixed ZLL/ZHA scenario have been documented (in the spec linked above) and stated to be:
• ZHA and ZLL commands have different commands and can potentially have device ID conflicts.
• ZHA devices cannot join to ZLL networks because they do not have the requisite ZLL keys.
• For interoperability purposes, ZLL devices must maintain both ZHA and ZLL keys.
Also the document says this: "Additionally, a ZLL application can determine at runtime whether to operate as a ZLL or a ZHA device, depending on which type of network it occupies".
So once properly joined and functioning in a ZHA network, a ZLL device (including a bulb acting as a router) is designed to the same specs as a ZHA router, and fully capable of repeating frames for any device in the mesh.
Yet there were/are lots of reported problems with Zigbee bulbs. So why all the issues? I remember back in the 2016-era SmartThings days that folks having more than a certain number of OSRAM and Cree bulbs were seeing flaky behavior (the tipping point seemed to be more than 9 bulbs, IIRC). One of the earliest OSRAM bulb firmware updates was pushed to supposedly fix a buffer overrun issue (it was followed by a couple more firmware updates, maybe it took a couple iterations to fix this problem). Not sure that Cree ever pushed any firmware updates for its product line; their Zigbee Connected bulbs seem to be gone from the big box stores now.
Perhaps early OSRAM/Cree firmware issues have been conflated with the ZHA/ZLL profile differences?
For the record I use 7 old Zigbee bulbs (4 OSRAM at the latest firmware; 3 Cree with their original firmware). XCTU shows that a couple of the OSRAMs are routers in the mesh. They are trouble free with the exception of one in an outdoor fixture that periodically (every 3 months or so) needs to be factory reset to start working again.
On paper, sure, but we know that manufacturers don’t always meet the specs no matter zll, zha, or 3.0 (I’m looking at you, Enbrighten Zigbee dimmers).
In my case it was somewhere around 45 bulbs with Ledvance only bulbs. It seemed to be fewer with Osram, which used a different zigbee chip than Ledvance did for bulbs that strangely carried the same model number. The bulbs burned out so fast that they had all been replaced under warranty with the Ledvance version before the warranty was up.
I think it probably also has a lot to do with transmission and reception power of certain devices. Notable is that the bulbs seemed to always register around -70 to -80, even within 10 feet of the hub. Much lower than any of my Samsung outlets or GE dimmers. I had to keep a few extra repeaters on the bulb mesh for reliability a couple years ago when I added my second HE.
Yes that would make sense; the bulbs have enough compute power (all have 32-bit ARM Cortex cores) but who knows how good the antennas are with that form factor.
Hey Ken, How high was the HO recessed's output? I have the std. recessed RGBW, which have been great (73858) and are 65 watts/800 lumen. I paid 11.00 per light. Amazon has them now at $100.00 per light !! What the hell do they think they are? Hue or something...
1400 lm. I bought a few of them for $25 each on sale (sold by Amazon) a couple years ago and bought a couple more back in October for $50 each just because I like them so much (don’t know where they are going yet).
I can't find then, except for 100+ each. If you should decide to let them go, please keep me in mind.