Smart Bulb Tapo L535(E/B) | Constant Disconnect and Reconnect from WiFi
I just received 8 of these new bulbs and am having a very difficult time keeping them responding via Apple Home or the Tapo App. They either react very slowly or will say "no response".
I have mostly idevice homekit switches and excellent wifi coverage. Everything else in the house responds instantly.
I have been going through all of my network setting trying to figure out what is happening with no luck. All of the bulbs will just randomly change to "no response" and then eventually re-appear. I can watch them come in and out of existence using the "Discovery" app on the iphone. This is an mDNS scanner. The bulbs will show up in matter and then disappear. Many times when they disappear they will also not be controllable via the Tapo app.
Is this a known issue? These are the only matter devices I have. Everything else is homekit certified.
I have gone through every sort of troubleshooting imaginable and the bulbs are still randomly not responding. I am very experienced with networking and IoT devices. I can see the bulbs connected to my Netgear WAC510 access points with good signal. They are on a 2.4GHz only SSID with the rest of my IoT devices. This SSID is part of my normal LAN network and not segregated. My setup has been working flawlessly with over a dozen other Homekit devices for years. My Apple Hub is a brand new AppleTV 4k Ethernet.
I am looking at my Netgear Insight logs and the L535 Bulbs are constantly disconnecting and reconnecting to different Wireless Access Points. I see the mac address move from the nearest base station with a good signal to a base station further away with a poor signal. The logs are full of disconnect and re-connect notices multiple times per minute. I assume this is why my Apple Home app just shows them all randomly going No Response and then back online.
I have three wireless access points to cover my entire house and garage. According to the logs it appears the light bulbs cannot pick where to stay connected to.
Although I had tuned my access point power levels to ensure I do not have too much signal overlap in my house, I decided to change each access point to full power to see if the Tapo devices would stay stuck to a base station better. There was a definite improvement in response time once I increased all the radios to full power. The Tapo devices will still randomly show "no response" but they will work within 5 - 20 seconds if I wait in the home app. The Netgear Insight logs still show the Tapo bulbs disconnecting and reconnecting several times a minute for no apparent reason. I will see an RSSI of -57 and the bulb will disconnect and reconnect over and over again. This is happening even with signal strengths better than -50.
It seems to me like there might be a firmware issue with these bulbs in an environment with multiple access points all broadcasting the same SSIDs. The bulbs need to be a little more "sticky". As far as I can tell the bulb is initiating the disconnect and reconnect from WiFi for no apparent reason. I assume this problem would not exist in a house with only one wireless access point.