I preordered two boxes, but currently only using 3 actual bulbs. They’re so unreliable compared to my Philips Hue bulbs. Frequently the bulbs are “offline” and I have to power cycle them to get them to respond.
Now by all means, Hue bulbs aren’t perfect, but they’re much more reliable than the Wyze Bulbs. It’s getting frustrating. At this point, spending double for a Hue bulb would be a good deal, since they work much more reliably.
I hope Wyze is continuing to work on the bulbs reliability because currently, I regret having spent money on them.
Mine work. Maybe I’m in the minority. The biggest issue I have seen is people putting their bulbs inside a metal canister. Some had problems due to distance from the router. Of course if you turn the wall switch off they will drop off-line. Sometimes family members do that.
Do you have a specific situation you would like to discuss?
The specific situation is my bulbs randomly go offline and it’s frustrating. The bulbs are not in a metal canister. There should be no issue with distance to router as I have a whole house Netgear Orbi mesh network and the Wyze cameras sitting near the bulbs connect fine. I understand the wall switch issue, but none of these have wall switches. They’re stand-alone lamps and yes, someone could still switch them off, obviously I’m well aware of that but these are times the bulbs just go offline. I have to cycle power to get them to connect. Sometimes it’s after a power flicker. So if that’s the culprit, it’s random as it doesn’t affect all bulbs equally, and it’s something they should fix. Every other Wyze device I have recovers fine from a power flicker.
IDK but my Hue bulbs don’t have any of these issues, and they’re much further from their hub than any of my Wyze bulbs are from an access point.
I gave up on mine. One of my 4 worked fine from day one. The other 3 routinely turned on and off by themselves. Even after upgrading the firmware numerous times.
I went through weeks of my own troubleshooting. If you search the forum you wil find the thread but to summarize…
Put them all on a UPS(pure sinewave APC smartups).
Ran wireshark to monitor the connection for a weekend. I found they would reboot for no reason and then turn on even though their last mode was off. The reboot seems to do with them losing the IP address. I know its not my router as the router had requests from the bulb, nothing about the router dropping the connection.
I took one apart and dumped the eprom code and found what looked like data corruption to I took apart my good one and dumped its eprom too. When comparing the data was definitely different(aside from the mac ids). It looked to me that the firmware update was not working right.
My semi-educated guess is the ESP-Wroom-02 controller is not as compatible with their system as they expected. Meaning that if the firmware mucks up when updating, there is no way to fix that OTA. I also know many people have no problems which is great for them. Those of us who have bulbs turning on for no particular reason are pretty frustrated at this point.
I copied the firmware from the good bulb to a bad bulb after using an espressif utility to wipe the controller code. That bulb has been OK since.
The whole experience was pretty frustrating for me. I opened a support ticket and didn’t get any reply for 2 weeks until I opened another and made a mild stink. They were polite and tried their best I guess, but nothing was ever resolved by them on their end. To this day the ticket is still probably open and I have 2 bulbs that are no good. Technically I violated the warranty anyway by troubleshooting but no one was helping to I had to help myself.
I ended up buying another brand of tunable(warm to cool white) wifi bulb and they are working fine. AOCOCR was the brand.
This is probably unrelated but the outlets are using the ESP8266 instead of the ESP-WROOM-02. I wonder if that’s due to the bulbs? More likely its what the company who made the outlets for Wyze wanted to use. I will say the outlets have been working fine so far.
I have 15 bulbs currently installed one I haven’t figured out what to do with yet. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, stairway and basement all come on and off with sense motion sensors. The others I control with an Echo. I even have one outside on the porch. Haven’t had any problems accept when the servers had issues. I do live in a rural area so no other wifi around. The only thing I do a little different is all my WiFi stuff has manually assigned IP address
How did you assign static IP’s to the bulbs? Via your router through MAC binding or is there a way through the wyze ap? I tried using my router to assign the same IP to each bulb but it’s still essentially dhcp. Just managed by me instead of the router. It didn’t make any difference when I had issues. If you have a way to set static IP through the ap on the device I would love to know. that would make me a lot happier as I prefer static IPs on all my devices.
When I did my wireshark test, I used a modified WRT54G with DDWRT on it to get the port mirroring for wireshark. It still had the erroneous turn on issue happen. Seems to be router independent(the issue).
I did hope that Wyze support would have given me some feedback as to why they updated the firmware or what issues they saw. I would have been happy to test and be a guinea pig. I feel like my opportunity to help has passed or was not welcome(or possibly even needed). I routinely do tests for other home automation companies so I have a decent understanding and skill set for finding problems in these devices.
I do all mine through the router. Be honest not a tech guy just started watching a few YouTube videos. Been putting stuff on static IP before got in to smart home stuff been doing it ever since.
The firmware update was to correct an issue causing the bulb’s WiFi adapter to be restricted to 802.11g. People with old firmware had to turn on “compatibility mode” (b/g/n) to get to the original bulbs:
BTW, all my bulbs are using DHCP, and I don’t see issues.
The Hue bulbs are not WiFi connected while the Wyze bulbs are. I personally don’t have any issues with either my Hue or Wyze bulbs but I would imagine any poor signal strength or interference in the 2.4Ghz range, wireless phones, microwaves, other WiFi devices etc could cause issues.
I have one bulb that has connection issues which I need to power cycle every so often. But it is in a bad spot for my crappy wifi signal and I am also using a adapter for it to plug into the fixture. So I chalk it up to either of those situations. I plan to get a mesh wifi system to get better signal in that part of the house and hope it will help. If not then I think it would be the adapter I am using. The adapter in question is a GU24 to E26. For now I still like the bulbs.
Oh. One other issue but it does not involve the bulb is that it my Amazon Echo something’s doesn’t understand the name I gave one of my bulbs. I have been planning to change it but haven’t yet. I’m procrastinating.
Currently have 4 online. Have had zero issues thus far. I have Google Assnt tied in to turn them on /off w/ voice and Wyze rule to make sure they are off after midnight. So far so good. Google Hub wifi
Philips uses ZigBee or Z-Wave wireless protocols, I think. They are more reliable because of that and I will make a wild guess that Wyze chose WiFi because it is cheaper to implement and and the other protocols may require a license fee to use and sell. That said, I have been frustrated with these also. Mostly my issue has been losing configuration after a light switch is turned off and then having to follow a very specific methodology on my iPhone around getting on the correct network and not auto joining to get them working again.
I use 3 of these only with a light switch. 2 are grouped together to turn off 30 seconds after someone turns them on, and one is told to turn off if it is on at dusk. All 3 are hallway lights and cause nighttime reflection problems in a window cam.
In any case I’ve never had them fail or need to be reset in the app because the light switch had been off. I an on an iPhone too. You shouldn’t ever need to change your iPhone network to get them online.
I suspect the root cause is in the hardware used. The ESP-WROOM-02 is not nearly as prolific as the ESP8266. Every other wifi bulb I have uses the ESP8266 and they work flawlessly. In the Wyze outlets, they used the 8266 and they have been fine for me so far. I’ve tried to ‘break’ them and they have been resisting everything.
I wonder if they have changed anything in the bulbs? I may order some in a few weeks and see if the guts are still the same.
I have 20 and they are all working perfectly. I have even replaced my hue bulbs with them, primarily so I could have tunable bulbs in every room. I can’t say that I have had an issue with them since the service outage several weeks ago.
