Wyze Bulb: unable to finish pairing, Connection timed out

I wanted to chime in on a solution I found with this issue for those who have tried several of the above suggestions and still have no luck (that’s what happened to me). I finally found a solution to my issue and figured I’d add to the knowledge-base here.

I spent well over 15 hours trying all of the above, and every variation of router setting I could find. I could get my bulbs to connect on another router, but not my main powerful router, though most other Wyze devices worked on it just fine (I had some problems with some Wyze plugs too though). It was driving me CRAZY! I knew it wasn’t the Wyze device specifically because I had some issues with some other bulbs in the past too…but it didn’t explain why some devices worked okay, just not others.

Finally, I stumbled on a post that indicated WRT-based routers were having some issues with IOT device connections for some weird reason.

This gave me an idea since I had replaced my router’s stock firmware with an Open-WRT based firmware (called Gargoyle-Router), so I wondered if that might be contributing to the issue. I then searched if anyone had posted about IOT device issues with Gargoyle and discovered that, indeed, someone else had been having similar problems (not with Wyze, but the issue was generalizable).

Someone said that the WiFi driver in [my] Linksys WRT32X device (at least while running Gargoyle) has some kind of issue. It was suggested to disable the WMM (WiFi Multimedia).

WMM? I wondered what that was and if this caused others issues in other routers too. I searched online and found that some other people were having IOT device issues caused by WMM on other routers too. Some IOT devices wouldn’t pair and some wouldn’t work at all if WMM was enabled. So the obvious solution was to just disable it.

The problem was that there was no option for me to disable WMM! I could disable normal QOS (Quality of Service / Bandwidth limitations), but not WMM, the option didn’t exist in the GUI anywhere! I finally knew what the likely issue was, but fixing it would be difficult.

One guy warned that if I disabled the WMM on my 2.4GHz SSID, I couldn’t get 802.11n speeds on that SSID network anymore (though I still would on the 5GHz…either way it wasn’t a huge deal since my internet wasn’t above 54mbps anyway). Still, it was suggested to create an extra “guest network” SSID on the router and disable WMM on that one, and just have all the IOT devices connect that. Then I would keep the N speeds on my primary 2.4GHz SSID, but the picky IOT’s like these Wyze Bulbs could still use the 2.4GHz on the Guest network. So I did this.

I then found and followed instructions to log into my router with PuTTY (a free SSH and Telnet client). After logging in to my router with PuTTY (I had to use an Ethernet Cord, not WiFi for some reason), in my case, for my router/firmware, the commands to disable the WMM on the guest network SSID were the following:

uci set wireless.ap_gn_g.wmm=0
uci commit wireless
wifi

I then tried to set up the bulbs again and this manually disabling the WMM worked! All Wyze bulbs/devices will now pair to my router and function correctly.

I mostly wanted to post this here for others in the future that are frustrated to wits-end (like I was) when all of the above suggestions still wouldn’t work for you. It may simply be that your router has a WMM issue preventing your Wyze bulbs from pairing/connecting. Consider searching for how to disable WMM for your particular router, maybe you’ll just have a simple GUI option to click to disable. If that doesn’t work for you, you could always try a different router too…that also worked for me, but my other routers were way less powerful with a weaker signal…so I wanted to figure out how to get it to work on the router I actually wanted it on.
Best wishes.

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