Offline Devices

If your devices have not connected to your wifi network at all (if it's flashing) you should start here: Finding Wemo or Finding TP Links, or with the manufacture's app. The FAQs below will help if your devices cannot be found by AM, are not remaining available (reporting offline errors), or stop reporting state changes (AM Manager should typically show changes to device states immediately).

See below for connection issues specific to different device types.

Why do my devices keep dropping offline and coming back online?

It's usually one of:

    1. Router overloading/resource leaks. If a restart (power cycle) of your network devices, esp the router, solves your network problems for a few days, you probably need to arrange for a periodic restart. Use an old mechanical timer for the power supply if your router doesn't have a restart scheduler.
    2. Weak wifi signal or a poor device wifi receiver. Try positioning the router and/or the device closer together to see if that's the problem.
    3. No connectivity between your 2.4GHz and 5GHz router bands (this affects the protocols used for device discovery). First try DISABLING SSDP/UPNP if your router supports that setting (you should always do this anyway as it's a flawed protocol used to hack into routers). Then try renaming your 5GHz SSID to be unique from your 2.4GHz SSID. Connect your handheld devices to the 2.4GHz SSID when discovering devices.
    4. Broken discovery and the router has assigned new IPs to the devices. Assign your AWOL devices reserved IPs in your router's DHCP settings and rediscover them.

At the time of writing the Belkin firmware is still quite unstable, the wemos will stop responding, go offline, and then come back online after a few minutes. AM will keep trying to contact the wemo's by IP when this happens. If you've set a state (e.g. asked the wemo to turn on or off manually or using a rule) WemoManager will apply that change once the wemo comes back online.

On rare occasions the device needs a power cycle to reconnect (unplug it, or use the "restart" button on the light switches)

My devices can go offline often, sometimes for a long time. How can I make my devices more stable or recover faster?

    1. Set your router to a fixed channel; some devices can have trouble reconnecting if the channel changes.
    2. Use a fixed wifi channel (1,6, or 11 are common choices), fixed bandwidth of 20MHz, mixed mode (G+N).
    3. Use AM Manager details to check that each device has a strong signal (> 30%). Reposition the device or router if the signal is too weak.
    4. In your router set your wifi encryption key to a shorter time. I use 1 hour – causes the devices to reconnect every hour even if they go offline.
    5. In your router set your DHCP lease shorter, again I use 1 hour – causes the devices to reconnect hourly.
    6. Reserve the IP address for each device in your router's DHCP settings. Be sure to use the MAC address for the wemo that's shown in your router rather than the one printed on the wemo sticker. AM always checks the last IP address for a missing device.
    7. Move your devices’s to their own wifi router and/or subnet and reboot that network switch daily.
    8. Schedule your router to reboot daily or weekly.
    9. Use AM to disable/enable the wifi connection on your AM device on a schedule. This will cause the AM Server to recycle when the wifi connection is re-established.

AutomationManager/WemoHome shows an extra offline wemo that I don't own. It's UDN is shown as something like "Lightswitch-1_0-1234567890001" (note the 12345...).

This is an invalid UDN that was temporarily assigned to your wemo device by belkin while it was doing a firmware upgrade. Open your app and use the "Forget" option to remove it.

My AM Server (on android) sometimes stops. How can I keep it running?

Newer android devices are more aggressive with apps to save battery and resources. When running a server you often will need to confirm whether you have a task killer. If so, add the MPP server apps to the list of exceptions.

Check the wifi advanced settings for power savings and disable any setting that allows the wifi to be shut down.

It's usually necessary to force the android device to stay awake. First enable developer options: open settings, find "about device", find "Build number", and tap it 5-7 times. You should see a message that developer options have been enabled. Return to the settings main page to find the new options page. Enable "Stay Awake" to set the mode to prevent the screen (and android) from entering sleep mode. Always keep the server device on AC power.


In many cases your devices will be found automatically by AM, in the AM "Search" menu try "Find new devices" once or twice, waiting 1 minute between attempts. It usually helps if you can connect your handheld to your router's 2.4MHz SSID. If your devices are not found, see below for additional help.

Belkin Wemo

See Finding Wemo

TP Link

See Finding TP Links

Philips Hue (hub)

In the AM "Search" menu, use "Find Hue Bridges" and follow the instructions.

Once your hub is found AM will find your Philips accessories through the hub.

Philips Wiz

Assign your Wiz devices reserved (aka static) IP addresses in your router (typically in the LAN or DHCP section).

In the AM "Search" menu, use "Finding Philips Wiz"

Lightify Gateway

Assign your gateway a reserved (aka static) IP addresses in your router (typically in the LAN or DHCP section) if it is not found automatically.

In the AM "Search" menu, use "Find Lightify Gateway". Once the gateway is found your devices should be found automatically through the gateway.

Lifx Bulbs

Assign your devices reserved (aka static) IP addresses in your router (typically in the LAN or DHCP section).

In the AM "Search" menu, use "Find Lifx Bulbs"

YeeLight

Assign your devices reserved (aka static) IP addresses in your router (typically in the LAN or DHCP section).

In the AM "Search" menu, use "Find YeeLight"

Tuya (Smart Life)

Tuya is a provider of IoT cloud integration services, hardware, and applications to many low cost provides. The disadvantage of these devices is those providers can gather information about you (private information such as GPS location, etc), your devices, an your habits.

As an alternative to those providers you can instead associate those devices with the AM Tuya Service. Hosted in the TUYA cloud, the AM Service collects a minimum of information to connect and manage your devices (email and password for authorizing access, and the device list). AM will never use this information for anything other than device control.

Once a device has been added to the AM/Tuya service it can only be controlled from AM using the Tuya4AM adapter app.

As an alternative consider reflashing the ESP8266 based devices with AM's MppDevice firmware and controlling them directly from AM with no intervening cloud. See ESP8266.

Custom Devices

You can add Phone Management, Flag, AM Analog Tracker (controller), and Event devices for use in AM automation (rules).

Web based devices - sensors, switches, analog sensors that provide a suitable HTTP interface can be added to AM for use with Automation and the AM UI.

You can add devices hosted by your AM Server to any other instance of AM allowing you to control them remotely.

A weather device for gathering weather information from OpenWeatherMap can be added and used in your AM Automation.

IFTTT Devices

Devices that can be driven from or report to IFTTT are available. These devices can be triggered by "That" actions or can trigger "If" events on IFTTT. Devices representing custom services or devices not directly integrated into AM can be controlled through IFTTT as if they were supported AM devices.

MppDevices (ESP8266 Custom Devices)

See ESP8266

Espurna

See Espurna.