Yeelight RGV Keeps Losing WiFi

That’s a false dichotomy. Just because you bought another router that does not result in the same behaviour, does not mean it is the fault of the router. By contrast, I have a household full of devices and the Yeelights are the only ones affected, and there’s forums full of people with the same problem, so I guess I can conclude it is indeed the Yeelights, then?

Plus, I have other routers. I tried running them through a dedicated router which meant reconfiguring 35 devices that I frankly wish I hadn’t bought at this point, and it did not fix the problem. Now I am left to wonder, should I buy another router and test again? The TP-Link Archer C7 certainly isn’t cheap, it cost me around US$100 when I bought it, so I am not as inclined as you are to just hand wave the proiblem away because it doesn’t affect you anymore (but did, as I expect it has with many disappointed customers).

Unfortunately it is exactly this conclusion that I have seen in every thread so far, so I guess it will never be fixed, and I’ll just have to return my faulty devices. I have absolutely 0 other issues with the Yeelights so taking your lead, I suggest the team stop working on other people’s problems and fix mine, since I am not experiencing theirs…

Well I can only speak from my experience :slight_smile: I have 9 Yeelights of various makes, v1 white, v2 white, v1 RGB, v2 RGB, strip, 2x ceiling… I just know some routers “suffocate” when there are like ~15 devices connected… but who knows.

I am sure some do, but I have also seen too many concessions like this in the past by Yeelight users that mean that this issue does not end up getting investigated, and as a result we as consumers don’t get what we paid for.

It is super hard for us as users of an effectively black box product to prove a negative (ie it is not our equipment) or to explain to the devs where the issue is - they need to audit and strengthen their code and work out where they have gone wrong. Add some sort of watchdog routine to detect a lack of connectivity and automatically reset the device. Failing that, let me set a time for it to reset every night - I don’t care, but don’t make me turn it off and on at the power. Give me an automated solution. Add a reset command to the Yeelight spec so that i can script nightly resets of all of my bulbs, I would do that in a heartbeat rather than having to wait for them to stop working and fix them manually.

I have gone to the extent of setting up a Zabbix monitoring system to poll my bulbs until they fail to respond so I can reset them and to see exactly what makes them die. I tried to find a pattern from the results but there is just none to be found - this needs someone with knowledge of the code to find out where they have a hidden bug that causes a bulb or light strip to just entirely go offline. The fact that it affects my bulbs and strips but not my 3 Xiaomi Smart Home Hubs, or my 20+ Smart Wifi Sockets, or my 3 x Xiaomi phones, should again communicate the frustration of having all these Yeelight products that are all affected by the same issue unique only to my Yeelight devices. I do not have to manually reset ANY other device on my wifi network, period.

My whole intention with this setup was to remove all light switches and go entirely automated using sensors. I think you can see how that would be impossible given the current situation, I can’t be pulling the breaker to my light circuit every week because one light goes offline, and then there’s the 14 light strips I have that are plugged into appliance circuits.

What is super frustrating is that I can go to ebay, buy a 5m roll of SMD 5050 LEDs, hook them up to one of the Magic Home Pro based controllers that I use, hook it up to a power supply and it will run up to 20m of outdoor lights without an issue for months on end, yet these yeelight 2m LED strips cost the same amount of money and fall off the network every week or two requiring my intervention each time.

I don’t mean to be harsh to you, but clearly you’re a Yeelight enthusiast and by jumping straight in with the old “it’s your router” line, you ensure that I and the others with this issue won’t get a fix anytime soon, in fact soon enough this product line will fall out of active development within Xiaomi when they have their next area of interest and we’ll be stuck with this bug forever. If you really do think that Yeelights are an excellent product, you should be just as loud of an advocate as I am to get this frustrating, almost 2 year old issue fixed.

So if you don’t mind, I’d love for the Yeelight devs to see the trouble this is causing their users and to fix it, or I’ll just return them all and rig up my own LED strips as I described above and as I am successfully running myself. I cannot possibly recommend these devices to anyone else despite putting a lot of my own money into them, because I believe a glaring and critical bug has been ignored for too long, turning what should be a premium product into a cheap imitation version of a Hue or LiFX.

Give us a fix, Yeelight

@Soloam @ngardiner @jdarchin

Hello, cause we can’t reproduce the issue from our lab. I wonder if you could help us debug the issue.

Thus we can send you development board to catch log of the issue.

Hi,

As a firmware developer of Yeelight, I feel very sorry that you are facing above issues.

Connectivity issue may be caused by many reasons.

The router compatibility bugs belong to the most difficult bug report category one can imagine. We have fixed some after purchasing the routes mentioned in bug reports and reproducing them; but there are still some that we cannot even reproduce. We would appreciated it so much if you agree to do some test as dingyichen suggested.

There could be other possible reasons though.

  1. We fixed a bug that could cause the device to go irresponsive when lan control is enabled and heavily used;
  2. The signal strength is low, either due to the location its put, or some hardware defect in itself; this could be confirmed by checking the signal strength in the device’s ‘settings’ page
  3. Over heating. If the device always go offline after staying on for some while, consider this as a possible cause.

Hi Liu Fei,

I am more than happy to help, that is not an issue. We just really want to see the problem found and fixed. I can do tests for you if you need me to.

What I have done now is to screenshot all of my bulb device settings pages and I will send them to you directly. If you need other information, feel free to ask us.

Hi Yeelight Devs,

I’ve sent over the screenshots of all of my bulbs, and it’s been about a week, anything more you need? Is a fix for this problem progressing or are you waiting for more reports of issues?

Apparently it’s a bug in some tp-link routers. In fact, it is not a problem in routing, but in the transmission of wi-fi. I also discovered that the problem is not in the tp-link firmware, because I installed the DD-WRT custom firmware and the problem continued.
I solved the problem by purchasing an Access Point (Unifi uac-ap-lr) and disabling the radio from the tp-link router, and using the AP wi-fi. (continue using tp-link routing)
My lamps are no longer offline, and the response time is considerably faster.

Did you experience issues with any other devices, or only Yeelights?

I have the home assistant integrated with several other devices, like sonoff, broadlink, google home, chromecast, xiaomi gateway, phillips zhirui … and they all worked without problems. Only the yeelights had the problem of going offline
I bought the access point because I needed a wi-fi to support more devices, but I also figured it could solve the yeelights problem, and really solved it.

I also have the same setup with many of the same devices you list above, and I also use homeassistant.

Most of the discussion so far has been exactly what you said. Someone has issues with Yeelight connectivity, buys a new router and it’s fixed. I’ve seen tens of threads like that in my time, and none solved my problem since I haven’t been prepared to replace my equipment just because of Yeelights.

To be honest with you I don’t consider this a solution and the fact that only the Yeelights are affected says a lot. So while I am in no doubt that customers spending money replacing their AP may solve the problem (as long as the one they buy is not also affected), I’m going to push Yeelight to find out why this happens and solve it for all.

It is not about REPLACING the AP/router. I bought new, better router and put all my computers and phones onto it and left the OLD router only for Yeelights (and gateway, air purifier) and then the problems stopped… So I think it is about the number of devices on a router…

Yes and that’s fine, for you. What exactly should Yeelight be publishing for users to advise them on this compatibility issue? Perhaps what works for you doesn’t work for us? I have 2 APs which balance the load, and I can and will add more if I need to but it has not resolved the problem because they are the same router model and software (which work with every other device I have) and it just so happens to be one that doesn’t have the magic potion needed to work with Yeelights without them falling off the network. Given there is absolutely no guidance on what the secret sauce required for the product we purchased to work, what should I buy? From what supported hardware list? Are you starting to see how little value we get out of the story of one individual’s purchase that just so happened to work for them?

I bought yeelights specifically because they were interoperable with my existing network infrastructure. I did not want 3 different 2.4Ghz protocols talking all over each other all through my house. If I have to buy another piece of kit to work with Yeelights, it may as well be a z-wave gateway and a bunch of bulbs that work.

Now if you want to guarantee for me (and other Yeelight customers affected by this long term issue) in writing that buying one more AP and putting all my other devices onto it and leaving the 2 current APs for Yeelights will solve all my problems, I’ll do it. But I’ll be sending you the bill if it doesn’t. That is why I’m here on this message board asking the vendor of the product that I bought what the issue is and how to fix it, and not just impulsively acting on the suggestion of a single forum member whose bulbs are working.

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: I was just trying to add small piece of information that might be useful. I am also all in for Yeelight to fixing this even though I don’t have these problems NOW (which doesn’t mean I won’t in the future)…

It seems reasonable to suspect an issue between Yeelight devices and certain routers based on forum responses. Regardless of whether the responsibility is with the router manufacturer or not, does that mean there is a list of routers that have been confirmed to work whether officially or unofficially?

For the record, I have been experiencing issues with D-Link and TP-Link routers. I even have tried a Xiaomi Wifi Repeater 2 but, proving that signal strength is not the issue, the Yeelights often connect directly to the router even though the repeater is physically located halfway between.

I’ve thrown time and money at this already. If someone knows the router I should be using then that will be my last throw of the dice to fix this.

Cheers,

Dave

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Unfortunately, this is the problem with how this issue is treated on the Yeelight forums.

A number of issues:

  1. The forums are next to useless, because a long time problem like this just ends up being hundreds of small threads per instance of the problem, most of which are quickly blamed on the customer’s router

  2. If you have a dedicated thread like I have tried to maintain here, you need to keep it active, or it just falls off the forums page. Because there’s a limit to how many times I can post in a row, I have to wait until others comment.

I don’t believe the issue will ever be solved and I don’t know why people believe that the fact that they bought a new router and it suddenly worked helps anybody else. Those who post that they have found a new router have not mentioned what router it is that is compatible, just that buying a new one (I am guessing not the same device) fixed their issue. Sometimes they will tell you they bought a more expensive one which I suppose is meant to help narrow down candidates but given more expensive is relative it does not really help either.

In all cases, including those cases where forum participants speculate that it is to do with “too many devices” on wifi or whatever else, the one key question is never answered: why is it only Yeelights affected? These are not high bandwidth devices. They should not be in a position to fall off the network and never come back.

All I can hope is that more affected users see this thread and continue to post, so that Yeelight take this issue seriously. I also hope that those who are blaming it on the router despite the points above could then at least offer some advice on which make and model worked for them so we can correlate a list of routers that work with the broken Yeelight wifi handling.

I feel confident in calling it such, because I have not had this issue with any other device, and I have smart lights from 2 other vendors in addition to my Yeelights, so to me it is quite clear where the problem lies.

Thanks.

I’ll be taking everything out in the new year then. It’s a real pain because I’ve fed YeeLight Strips through false walls for under cupboard kitchen lights.

Buy cheap, buy twice.

Thanks for your help though.

I’ve just seen that I can buy a Xiaomi router for £15.

On one hand I don’t want to throw more good money after bad but, on the other, it would be hard for anyone on here to blame a Xiaomi router. My intention would be to set a small DHCP range with address reservations for the Yeelights so that they effectively had their own subnet straight to my DSL modem. All other devices will remain on another subnet.

The only thing that is stopping me is that I am not optimistic that this will fix it and so it is just more time and money to prove a point.

That is a good plan and it might work fine, only one issue though - I think you might have problems with MUSIC mode if you want to access Yeelights from another subnet. This is somethin I have tried first (makes sense to have different subnet for Yeelights) but music mode was not working (well). So I have everything on one subnet but another router and IP reservations (from x.x.x.200 upward is reserved for smart home)

You do you.

I am keeping this alive for those of us who won’t buy a Xiaomi AP just to be compatible with Xiaomi wifi products, however. It’s an interoperable protocol and any failure to interoperate is a failure regardless of the workaround, so whilst I wish you well in the endeavour it won’t change the outcome for others.

It may however end up being the first verified working platform if you’d be as kind as to share your experience with us.