Part 135: Cannot see that light

This post is very much related to my previous post -- how our kid now excitedly turns our lights on and off from wall switch. Before the phase we are now living through, our lights were managed either automatically or through Cozify app, so we could put whatever scene would be suitable on, to turn on multiple lights with the brightness level and color we want.

Bye bye, light

Philips Hue lights and other devices use Zigbee protocol to form a mesh network. Usually it is very reliable with devices rarely disappearing from our Cozify's radar. However, either its our old Cozify hub from 2017, or then the Zigbee mesh itself, but if you let a kid to manage the light switches, issues start to happen. Not all of the following lights diaappeared from the network because they would be physically powered down, but instead their communication to Cozify broke.

Once again it was Zabbix which made me realize that something wonky is going on. Thanks to its great alerting and the timelines that I can easily follow, I started to understand that the Zigbee network goes bonkers. I restarted the Cozify hub earlier today and ever since it has been smooth sailing again; we will see for how long that will last.

Like I mentioned in my Zabbix Summit speech back in 2022, Cozify is a great IoT hub, but it lacks in alerting and reporting. In theory I could setup alerting for each of these devices in Cozify, too, but doing that would be very cumbersome and limited. Of course, the app still shows the status with the dim items being unreachable.

But how to fix this?

No immediate fix, as of course we will let kid to use the light switches (in a nice way, no stroboscope style on-off-on-off-on-off...). Longer term, maybe I'll replace the light switches with IoT light switches which will turn off the lights but will leave them in standby mode instead of full power off. 

Another option would be to plug more Zigbee smart power sockets, as in my understanding those would still be part of the same Zigbee mesh, allowing the communication to continue even if many of the light bulbs would physically be off.