Known issues¶
All LIFX bulbs –except for the original model released with their kickstarter campaign (called the “Original 1000”)– are suffering from a critical firmware bug [1]. Under some specific and unknown Wi-Fi conditions LIFX bulbs will crash, forcing you to turn them off and then back on using a physical light switch.
Crashed LIFX bulbs will show up as unavailable [2] in the LIFX mobile
application and they will be missing in lightsd’s get_light_state result
list.
The only known workaround at this time is to try different Wi-Fi channel, you might find one that doesn’t trigger the bug for your bulbs and radio-frequency environment (LIFX bulbs are running in the very busy 2.4GHz band).
| [1] | More accurately a firmware bug within the Qalcomm Atheros chip upon which all LIFX products released since 2015 are built. |
| [2] | Kinda like this emoji: ⛔️. |
Power ON/OFF are the only commands with auto-retry, i.e: lightsd will keep
sending the command to the bulb until its state changes. This is not implemented
(yet) for set_light_from_hsbk, set_waveform, set_label, tag and
untag.
In general, crappy Wi-Fi network with latency, jitter or packet loss are gonna be challenging until lightsd has an auto-retry mechanism, there is also room for optimizations in how lightsd communicates with the bulbs.