Homey unable to connect to wifi

Bumblez

This definitely sounds like something they'll need to fix before the "retail experience'.

G4nd41f

I am using Windows 10 64bit with a brand new Chrome installation on both of my computers and it did not help .

I saw that homey even got an IP address assigned from my router, but only for a short time and then disappears again.
Are there maybe any issues with Athom servers?

MarcoF

It sounds like setting up homey in a lot of cases is a horrible pain in the ass experience..... 

Should really be fixed or optimized before retail. 
At that point it not done to ask a user to perform a low level image loading. These users will walk or send it back to MM. 

MarcoF

G4nd41f said:

I am using Windows 10 64bit with a brand new Chrome installation on both of my computers and it did not help .

I saw that homey even got an IP address assigned from my router, but only for a short time and then disappears again.
Are there maybe any issues with Athom servers?

Contact Support@athom.com for more information/suggestions/help. 

fredsky

I can not connect to my AP. Did try lowercase for name and password. Can not change the DNS address in my router. I am able to connect to my mobile Hotspot on Android phone and install update, but after a restart.. Still can not connect to my router. 
Yes.  Homey does show up for a few seconds in the router. 

tommyjay

Sorry if this has been asked before, I've been a bit absent from the forum lately.

I got my Homey today in the mail, and when I took him out of the box, he only had 2 feet. I was a bit surprised, I searched the box and found a metal ball. No biggie, I guess this is part of being a backer and not having the 'retail experience' that the email wrote about. 


But after plugging Homey in, I tried to connect to my wifi. The first time (being too excited and not reading the text on setup.athom.com) I entered my password in the SSID field. 

Okay, happens. Homey didn't connect and after about 10 minutes told me so. I turned him upside down and then (without a countdown) he told me to go to setup.athom.com again.

I did and set up again, this time with the correct SSID & Password. I tried both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, but nothing. Now I only get a red ring (after about 5-10 minutes of a pink/orange ring) and I've turned Homey upside down countless times and unplugged/reconnected him many more times. Nothing is happening.

Any ideas on what to do?

MarcoF

Support@athom.com ...... 
Sorry for my short answer, but the community can't fix this. 

ChristopherHelf

I had similar issues to the ones described here, and I think the problem was that my ISP only had IPv6 DS-lite implemented, so I had a global IPv6 address at my router, but only a shared IPv4 address so requests going to the public IPv4 address would not go through. After I told my ISP to switch me back to IPv4, it worked immediately the first time. 

Rebtor

Just mail support@athom.com. They respond very quickly on problems. I had a stroke of bad luck with my homey to. It completely died on me and turned itself in a really expensive desk light and is on its way back to Athom. Shit happens, quess he got homesick. Well Stefan promised me that he would fix him for me so we see and wait when he is back.

Bumblez

Still waiting for a reply on my mail to Athom Support... hopefully then can provide a solution to this.

I have to say, of all the issues Homey has, this definitely is the most disappointing. Just about every single device in my household can connect to WiFi without any problems, and without me ever having to change a single  thing in the router settings (devices like phones, tablets, laptop, TV, receiver, Raspberry Pi, Harmony hub, thermostat, even a solar panel inverter)... Homey is the first device I have ever had that fails to connect. I have tried a wide variety of changes in my router settings (just about everything mentioned in this thread and more), and nothing works.

And this isn't one of those issues where you simply wait for the next firmware update, download it, and hope it fixes the issue... no, without internet connection, Homey is nothing more than an expensive led light. So this is the one thing that they should have gotten right... and didn't.

And with regard to the 5 second that Homey connects to the router, then drops again, as mentioned by a couple of people... my guess is, that when you enter the SSID and password on support.athom.com, that data is sent to Homey's own webserver (HomeySupport), which then tries to verify if that info is correct. That connection apparently works, after which Homey disconnects again, shuts down its own webserver and tries to set up a new connection to the WiFi network... and for some strange reason, that fails.

I definitely hope they can fix this for everyone who has this issue, and that, before they send out the next batch of Homeys, they will make sure that those all have the latest firmware, with an improved WiFi initialization procedure. Otherwise they may well receive a large number of refund requests...

tommyjay

Bumblez said:

Still waiting for a reply on my mail to Athom Support... hopefully then can provide a solution to this.

I have to say, of all the issues Homey has, this definitely is the most disappointing. Just about every single device in my household can connect to WiFi without any problems, and without me ever having to change a single  thing in the router settings (devices like phones, tablets, laptop, TV, receiver, Raspberry Pi, Harmony hub, thermostat, even a solar panel inverter)... Homey is the first device I have ever had that fails to connect. I have tried a wide variety of changes in my router settings (just about everything mentioned in this thread and more), and nothing works.

And this isn't one of those issues where you simply wait for the next firmware update, download it, and hope it fixes the issue... no, without internet connection, Homey is nothing more than an expensive led light. So this is the one thing that they should have gotten right... and didn't.

And with regard to the 5 second that Homey connects to the router, then drops again, as mentioned by a couple of people... my guess is, that when you enter the SSID and password on support.athom.com, that data is sent to Homey's own webserver (HomeySupport), which then tries to verify if that info is correct. That connection apparently works, after which Homey disconnects again, shuts down its own webserver and tries to set up a new connection to the WiFi network... and for some strange reason, that fails.

I definitely hope they can fix this for everyone who has this issue, and that, before they send out the next batch of Homeys, they will make sure that those all have the latest firmware, with an improved WiFi initialization procedure.

I got an almost instant reply from Stefan. My problem was actually solved just by waiting (I disconnected Homey and tried again in 5 hours, this time everything worked from the start). Stefan's email:

Hi Tommy,
First of all our apologies for the foot that fell off. We are definitely going to talk about that with our production partner. You can just glue it back on if you want to, or we can fix it for you, but then Homey needs to leave your home again .
Secondly, I want to clarify (this is not clear in the docs), that holding Homey upside down while powered on only does something when setup is finished. Hence, the fact that Homey wanted to try again without a countdown and without you holding it upside down is perfectly normal.
As of now, it seems like Homey has a hard time connecting to your network. Some other people experience this problem, and it could be a myriad of different things, so I have a few questions and things you can try. You should not hold Homey upside down unless you do a dfu recovery via your PC. So you can keep Homey on its feet:
1) what does Homey do right now if you power it on (upside up)? Does it say anything? What does the LED ring do? Is HomeySetup netwok in the air?
2) Did you see Homey doing an update the first time you connected to HomeySetup?
3) are you using Google chrome?
4) you can check in your router logs if Homey tries to connect. for some people, changing some settings helped:
- DNS server to 8.8.8.8
- Set a fixed IP address and hostname for Homey (using Homeys mac address)
- disabling the 5 GHz wifi
5) make sure that you connect your laptop to the same network as Homey is connecting to
6) for some people, just trying again some more times helped - after setup, wifi connection stays stable, but in setup some Homeys have a harder time due to switching from AP mode to client mode.
If HomeySetup is not online, Homey might need a dfu recovery via a raspberry pi 2 or a mac computer. If applicable, would you happen to have access to one of these?
Best regards,
Stefan

Bumblez

Did all of that, and have been trying (at different times) for the past 3 days, so waiting didn't solve it for me, either. And yeah, I did receive an email reply from Stefan yesterday, after I had already answered a couple of questions from him. But the only thing it said, was:

Let me know if it starts working. Sometimes it also helps to just try 5 times - in the setup homey sometimes has difficulties switching wifi networks. Later on everything will work smoothly though.

Which didn't help at all...

[Edit] I turned this into a Github issue as well, as this really needs to be fixed before the next batch goes out the door. It shouldn't be necessary to try all kinds of changes in the router setup to get Homey to connect. Feel free to add your own experiences to that Github issue.

fredsky

I managed to get a working connection!

1. First I shut down my access-points.
2. Then I created a mobile hotspot on my android-phone (connected 4G), made name en password of the hotspot the same as they are on my accesspoints.
3. Made the connection between Homey and hotspot (after rebooting Homey)
4. took the plug out of Homey, turned the mobile hotspot off and restarted the accesspoints.
5. Replugged Homey.

Homey now has its ip-address in the router and I can connect through my laptop!

So the problem only seems to happen at first connection.

Bumblez

Great. Got it working (after only 2 attempts) using that same procedure. Updates all went well, and Homey is actually listening now. Time to start experimenting. The one thing this proves, is that it's definitely a software issue, not a hardware problem. I hope they fix it soon, and upload the latest firmware of all the newly manufactured Homeys before they start sending out the next batch.

By the way, is it normal that my.athom.com, when you select your Homey, only shows an empty page with "Beta", an exclamation mark and 4 dots? Like this:

bvdbos

great and lol, definitely not :-) Which browser are you using? Did you refresh the page? And what happens if you connect through your internal IP?

Bumblez

Using Chrome (latest update) from my PC (Windows 7) , and yes, I did refresh. And if I replace the <homey_id>,homey.athom.com with my internal IP address, it can't connect at all ("This site can’t be reached").
Accessing the same page from my phone works fine, though...

bvdbos

I meant just http://<internal-ip>/ (assuming you are home) but that doesn't work from your laptop? And it does work from your phone?

Bumblez

Got it working on my PC too, now... after rebooting the PC. Now the my.athom.com screen looks a whole lot fuller

nklerk

i hope my experience might help. This might not be true for every one.

when you setup homy and homey responds with a "sorry cannot connect with the wifi network" it could be that a) you have selected the wrong ssid. Fix=select the correct one or type it in manually.
b) provided the wrong password. Fix=type in the right password
c) your dhcp server refuses to provide an IP address. Fix= check your dhcp server (on your router, or NAS, or server) see if you can find your homeys Mac address in the logs and register à fixed up address.
the name is probably displayad "localhost"

if you need or are able to provide an name then type in localhost and do NOT use another name (this cost me many hours)

after I registered the fixed IP address I got the next error message "could not contact the athom servers" this was due I renamed the ip registration to homey. Somehow it needs to be named localhost. Unfortunately localhost isn't the best name they could come up with. And is a cause for issues in some cases.

setting up tethering on your phone might also resolve this. But only on an 2.4g phone. My iPhone uses 5ghz and so it didn't work. keep the name, password and security the same as your wifi. Only to setup then switch your normal wifi back on.

Julian

Last Friday I received my new router, the Ubiquiti Amplifi HD. Everything worked flawlessly but no matter what I tried Homey would not connect properly and when it connected it would loose its connection very quickly. Spent quite some time tackling this issue over the weekend (the WAF was deteriorating rapidly...). I tried every single suggestion in this topic but nothing worked. I reached out to the support of Ubiquity last night and got a reply this morning with a suggestion what I could try and it worked! 

Turned out that I had to set the 2.4ghz channel to 11 (ok tried that before) but also set the bandwidth from 20mhz to 20/40mhz (this option was not available in my old router,) and that did the trick! Since then the connection is rock solid

miguel9

I had the same problem and it worked for me after trying a few times. Just keep trying. If you had any issues with router, check this: 192.168.0.1. Hope this help!