Awesmazing wrote

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Hey all, just wanted to share my experience with the LB130s so far. I purchased 4 of these bulbs today and had a heck of a time getting them to work properly. They would connect sporadically with the kasa app and when they were connected changing colors/brightness would be responsive for a few seconds and then lag immensely trying to do further changes. The bulbs also required a firmware update which prompted for all four and likewise failed for all four repeatedly. I did some googling and found the iotUpgradeToolV1.3.zip on one of these forums. Sorry I don't have the link but that's exactly what it was called, it shouldn't be difficult to find. Now when I installed this, I had all 4 bulbs connected within the kasa app finally, albeit still very unresponsive. When I ran the upgrade tool on my computer, the scan function determined only 2 connected bulbs, so I started with them.

I tried to simply click a bulb and press update, but it returned a failed message with an error 6 code. The tool has a nice UI that shows the local IP address as well as the mac address for each bulb it finds connected to your network. It also very handily tells you the port being used on your router, the 4 digits after the IP address. In my case they showed a local ip 192.xxx etc. and a port of 9999. I went into the settings page for my Netgear router and forwarded the port 9999 both udp and tcp to the first local IP of one bulb listed in the update tool. Then clicked that bulb in the update tool and clicked the update option. The update immediately downloaded, the bulb responded to the update, restarted, and had an INCREDIBLE improvement within the app. Colors changed instantly and for as long as I was changing them, there was no lagging or delay whatsoever. I repeated this process for the IP address of the 2nd bulb the updater had found and had the same result.

Then I removed the other 2 non-updated bulbs by long pressing them in the kasa app and tapping delete/remove. Next turned the light switch for one of them off/on 5 times to reset it. I connected it back to the kasa app, now the 3rd among the 2 updated ones, scanned for it within the update tool on my pc, which it found, forwarded the 9999 port to the local IP of the 3rd bulb and proceeded with another successful update. Same process for the 4th bulb, on/off 5 times, connect to kasa, scan on update tool, forward port, update.

Now all the bulbs, even the 2 furthest away from my router, respond instantly, even to scene changes and all act accordingly at the same time. The entire issue seemed to have been the TP-Link update service unable to get beyond the firewall in my router. In the end, forwarding the appropriate update port to each bulb, as tedious as it was, worked flawlessly. The new firmware even has an improved user interface in the app and makes changing colors and brightness a lot easier. With palette options instead of only a color wheel. It's really an awesome system once it's working.

Hopefully this advice helps someone else out or isn't duplicate knowledge, I tried to make this as detailed and layman friendly as I could. If you're still having similar problems to what I was experiencing after trying this all out, or difficulty with these steps, let me know. I know a bit about tech and I'll help how I can.

First, yes I am very late for a response, but this is some very good information. Usually customers assume that the bulbs are simply bad, and it is not the router doing anything since they have internet. Thanks again, as I will be noting this potential fix for future issues.