The impossible has occured: 2.2.9.140, at least, fully supports GE Link lamps!?!?

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Folks,
It's been quite a while since I've interacted with this community; my long recovery from heart valve replacement surgery has somewhat dampened my enthusiasms. So, let me recap.

Back in the Summer of 2014, I went to Home Depot to look for LED lamps to replace nine 60 Watt incandescent bulbs in a nearly inaccessible chandelier (and not at all accessible in my current, fragile state as I don't want to risk falling two storeys into the front hall). In their lightbulb section were many 800 lumen LED lamps, but none were under $30, which seemed a bit extreme. But on my way out, I noticed an end-cap display for the Quirky/GE Wink system, which included as a loss leader a kit consisting of a hub and two GE Link lamps for $29.99. Needless to say, I bought the kit and a bunch more lamps, for $13 each, got a friend to help, rigged up a multi-fold ladder across the hole in the floor in the upstairs hall, and we replaced the old incandescent bulbs with GE Link lamps, pairing them as we did it.

Eventually, I bought about forty more GE Links and various other HA devices, but I could never get the nine-lamp chandelier to work properly. One after another, lamps would drop-out and require re-pairing and, if I left the fixture powered-on, other devices in the mesh would stop working as well. This was the very early days of Wink, so I spent a lot of time with their techs, including driving to Quirky R&D headquarters in Schnectady, NY, just over an hour one-way, multiple times. But, eventually, they solved multiple issues, including firmware updates they pushed to the GE Link lamps, and my mesh, including the GE Links in the chandelier, started working properly.

Then, as everyone here probably knows, Ben Kaufman closed Quirky and sold Wink. For awhile, all was well, but when Wink was resold to the rapper will.i.am, it became obvious that I had to find another solution. Almost exactly two years ago, I switched to Hubitat and, generally, have been extremely satisfied. There are, of course, issues, but the platform is updated regularly (two updates, today, in fact) and rare severe problems are very quickly dispatched.

My largest issue back in October, 2019 was that most of my lamps were the original GE Links, and they behaved as badly with Hubitat as they had originally with Wink. To make a very long story short, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the GE Link lamps only worked well with the Wink system, that their firmware violated any number of Zigbee standards, and that they would never be supported by Hubitat. This was repeated, and vehemently, by one of the founders of Hubitat, so I took him at his word and bought over fifty replacement lamps, most of them Sengled and Sylvania.

Meanwhile, a huge box of GE Link lamps has been shoved for a couple of years under a Hoosier cabinet in my dining room. So far, so good. The other day, my niece, who has been staying with me in the attic, asked if I had a couple of light bulbs as she wanted to populate an empty fixture. She started with one, grabbed it out of the box, and installed it. Meanwhile, I had to factory reset and re-pair one of the Sengled lamps, which had been left in an unstable state following a flicker from the utility. When I did so, the Sengled lamp re-paired properly, but my C-5 found a new device, and assigned it the "Advanced Zigbee Bulb" driver.

Even though it's far from the other devices in the Zigbee mesh, it works fine and responsively. I'd never heard of this newish driver, which I see goes back at least to the beginning of this year, but I thought to try re-pairing the nine chandelier lamps I haven't been able to replace and, lo and behold, these GE Link lamps, which I was told that Hubitat would never support, work perfectly and, in fact, they work better than they did under the Wink system (where they'd come on in ones and twos over a period of several seconds). Here's how they're detected:

  • endpointId: 01
  • model: SoftWhite
  • application: 02
  • softwareBuild: 2.0.2.8
  • firmwareMT: 10DC-4701-02000208
  • manufacturer: GE

There is a remaining issue, but it's minor: when I try to add any of these GE Link lamps to a dashboard, as individual devices, they don't show-up in the list of devices in the "add tile" dialog.

To say I'm delighted would be an understatement. Thanks again, Hubitat!

Jeff

Chandelier
Chandelier1920×1080 594 KB

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Did you add them to the dashboard under the Apps tab?

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Now you know how long NEVER is.

If only we could get an answer on how long FOREVER lasts. :smiley:

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Ah! I'd forgotten this is necessary. I did add them to the Alexa and Google apps. That did it, thanks!

Jeff

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I forget about it almost every time…

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The "Advanced Zigbee..." bulb drivers are new, but I'm not aware of any changes they've made to their Zigbee implementation in a while and not anything that would have affected these bulbs specifically. The driver is also unlikely to affect much (though this one does have some additional features and some changes compared to the "Generic..." equivalents).

The issue, as you've likely been told before, has to do with the bulbs themselves; they are technically repeaters, but they apparently do a poor job of repeating for non-bulb devices, which can cause messages to/from those devices to be lost or the devices to "fall off" your network. This is why the recommendation you've probably heard is to keep them on their own network, whether that's an additional Hubitat hub or another option like a Hue Bridge (that's my preferences for lights--it's lighting-oriented and does it very well, and it's easy to integrate with Hubitat...but either way should work). This isn't unique to the GE Link bulbs, though they do appear to be among the most problematic.

I'm still glad to hear you're having good luck. But I suspect it might have more to do with the fact that it sounds like you only have one bulb, not a network full of them. And if it's on the edge of your network, the bulb is probably less likely to be used as a repeater and less likely to be problematic.

But it doesn't mean it won't happen eventually, even if less often. :smiley:

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Yes, once more devices decide to start routing through the bulbs I suspect problems will arise?

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Actually, it's not just the one lamp, it's the one in the attic and nine in the previously problematic chandelier. I've had no hangups with any devices since I put these ten lamps back into service, but we'll have to wait and see what happens. And some are effectively repeating, apparently. Tomorrow, I might try putting them all back on the generic driver and see what happens.

Jeff

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I can't understand why replace all those bulbs instead of wall switches. I can see table lamps.

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Keep preaching the gospel brother!

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There are several reasons. First, in 2014 (and even now, I think), there were no Zigbee or Z-Wave switches supported by Quirky which had normal bat handles which would fit in the two-switch box in the upstairs hall. There are many other reasons, but I won't bore you with most of them as they involve personal preference.

But I'm glad it was impossible in 2014 for me to go that route as the house was built and wired (knob-and-tube, originally) in 1900 and all of the wall switches are simple two-wire interruption loops, and none of the boxes have a common live. I did eventually install a couple of Lutron Caseta wall switches, which barely fit in single boxes but, even though Wink supported Lutron, I had lots of issues with the switches freezing, probably due to the fact that, without a common supply, they run on leakage current, which is a compromise.

When I switched to Hubitat two years ago, I replaced the Lutron Casetas with Inovelli Red switches, which I prefer to the Casetas, not the least because they use standard Z-Wave, but I still have problems with the Reds, and for the same reason. I have one for the dining room chandelier, but after it's turned off, one of the lamps always lights dimly. If I set the switch to use a lower current, it stops working, so I live with the compromise. For my front porch, also on a Red, as there were only three low-wattage candelabra base LEDs, I had to replace one lamp with an incandescent as there was no current setting which would work with the Inovelli Red switch.

You get the idea. Rarely is anything as simple as it seems.

Jeff

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You might consider installing a minimum load capacitor at the load for your non-neutral switches.

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Thanks. I'll look into it.

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My motto is "nothing is easy". I should have known.

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So, I ran a test yesterday. The GE Links are still repeating properly, no other devices have hung-up, and everything works perfectly, still.

I wrote a simple, throw-away rule to light the nine lamps in sequence and then turn them all off. With the "Advanced Zigbee Bulb" driver, all worked perfectly. I then laboriously switched all nine of them back to the old "Generic Zigbee Bulb" driver and the test no longer worked. All nine lamps eventually came on, but every time the rule turned them all off, a few would remain on randomly. If I just used the chandelier's tile on my dashboard to toggle them all on and off, I found the system to be relatively sluggish. I switched the lamps back to the new driver and all behavior is perfect again. I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but as long as the GE Link lamps work, I'll keep using them.

Jeff

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No kidding. I spent the whole weekend tracking down a ZigBee mesh issue on my Hue bridge. It was working perfectly for 3 years and all of a sudden half my bulbs went unreachable.
I looked deeper and found my Unifi wifi switched to channel 11 which caused interference on my Hue bridge ZigBee channel 25. I can't change my Hue channel due to my other Zigbee hubs. It should be easy just to channel my Ubiquiti Unifi Wifi channel. Nope, I hit an "invalid ID" bug which is a pain in the ■■■ to find and Ubiquiti support is next to useless. Many hours and google searches later. I managed to solve my issue and found my Wifi switched channel because my neighbor's new wifi system.

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Couple of WiFi6 LRs ought to take care of the neighbor issue!! :smile:

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