Bulb firmware upgrade failed
Opened this issue · 7 comments
Just received an A21 bulb today. It came with firmware 1.86 installed. Turned it on, connected to my WiFi, and integrated in Home Assistant. I saw there were 2 newer firmwares with 1.92 being the newest, so I downloaded the bin.gz and flashed it. It reported back success and rebooted. When it came back it didn't reconnect to my WiFi, but instead started broadcasting its default SSID. I could connect to its default SSID briefly before it would drop connection (presumably rebooting) before rebroadcasting its default SSID again. After it did this several times, I tried to do the WiFi settings reset by turning off, then on for 2-5 seconds and doing that 5 times. However, it never flashed 3 times and turned red. Instead after the 4th time it flashed once and came back on. In any case, afterwards I reconnected and put in my WiFi SSID information. It flashed and rebooted and then would connect to my network for 1-3 seconds (based on a ping of the IP) and then be unpingable for 30 seconds. During the 30 seconds of being unpingable its default SSID would be broadcast to connect to. I let it sit this way for about 10 minutes and it never stayed connected. However, during this entire time the light would stay on very dim with a yellow-green color the whole time. Not sure what to do at this point.
I'd put up a temporary hotspot with credentials initial_ap / asdfasdfasdfasdf and the bulb should connect to that when reset. From there you can either flash back to the older firmware or create your own firmware with credentials built in and see if it works better. Or try Tasmota.
I created an initial_ap SSID with the password. Over 5 minutes, the bulb appeared on the network for about 2 seconds and that was it. It's starting to feel that the firmware update didn't actually complete successfully as it reported and that I have a bricked bulb.
If there's nothing I can do to unbrick this bulb, can I get a replacement?
Can you return through Amazon?
Trying that now. Should the firmware update process otherwise work or did I do something incorrectly? I have 2 A19 bulbs that shipped with an even older firmware that I'm scared to update right now.
I'm pretty certain there is something broken with the 1.92 firmware. I have 2 A19 bulbs and I took one from 1.851 -> 1.86 -> 1.87 -> 1.92. All of the upgrades worked great except the one to 1.92. Now this bulb is in the same state as the A21 one before.
Here was my process. For all steps the update was done through the native web interface of the device.
- Upgraded to 1.86.
- Waited 5 minutes once device was pingable and verified it stayed on network the entire time.
- Verified HA could communicate to and update the device.
- Upgraded to 1.87.
- Waited 5 minutes once device was pingable and verified it stayed on network the entire time.
- Verified HA could communicate to and update the device.
- Upgraded to 1.92.
- Waited 5 minutes. Device never became stable on the network. Previous A21 device behavior of pingable for 2-4 seconds then not for ~30 secs. This behavior continues regardless of whether there is an SSID of initial_ap available or not. Bulb lighting is it's previous before the upgrade; however, there is a periodic slight flicker (presumably as it resets/reboots).
Also, both bulbs successfully upgraded to 1.87 with the above. I only attempted one bulb to 1.92 and when that bricked the bulb, I didn't attempt on second bulb.