Integrating Zigbee Canless Lights For Entire Home - Juno Connect

Yeah happy to help!

For starters, I think you’ll have to swap the Aux and 2-1 as the Line in has to always go to the 2-1, unless you are able to somehow take the line from where the Aux is and run it to the 2-1 w/out wiring it to the Aux.

After that, can you let me know if these are the Zigbee enabled ones, or are they just Bluetooth?

They are Zigbee enabled, I will switch the 2-1 and Aux when I get home to see if that remedies the issue.

Ok, good to know – in addition to that, can you try these steps? It should help with the sporadic bulbs turning on:

This is the diagram I used for wiring originally
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I run Home Assistant. I’ve tried these lights with both Z2M + Texas Instruments Z-Stack ZNP, and ZHA + Texas Instruments Z-Stack ZNP, and also Deconz + Conbee II stick, and in all of these scenarios, you join the lights to the coordinator, they work for a bit of time, then they disconnect permanently and the only way to get them functional again is to factory reset + pair.

I literally have 8 of these wafers NOW connected to a Sonoff Power Switch and I have a button on the wall that just turns the power on or off to these – I no longer control their brightness or color temperature ~ I might as well have purchased dumb lights.

@Bcohen8129. I am in a similar boat.

I have random Juno Connects drop off and then need to be repaired, and there seems to be an upper limit that after having 26 units on a zigbee network, pairing additional units becomes almost impossible.

I will say Acuity has been somewhat receptive to wanting to fix issues. I say somewhat because they seem very locked into the smartthings platform (which I left a long time ago).

I would say/ask please reach out to Juno Smart Connected (Juno AI): [email protected]

Not that I think they’ll waive a magic wand, but the more they hear there are issues, the more chance they’ll push a firmware update to fix things.

I’ve even gone so far as to resurrect a smartthings hub and create a dedicated zigbee mesh of just the Juno Connects. Their development team seems to be working with the Samsung Smartthings software team and the focus of their tech support is on smartthings. So my theory was take all their excuses away and get them on a platform that they can access/troubleshoot.

-When working they work great.
-When one drops off a network in a circuit with 11 of them, it’s a freaking PITA…

-Jonathan

I have the same problems as everyone else here seem to have.

I have emailed the address posted above, and I suggest everyone else do the same!!!

[email protected]

TLDR: GO GET AN AEOTEC SMARTTHINGS HUB AND YOUR PROBLEMS WILL GO AWAY!!!

OK, so holy f*ck…

I spoke with someone @ Acuity and brace yourselves for this response…

I was told that these lights were designed SPECIFIALLY to only work with 3 hubs and 3 hubs only, and that if you try to go outside of these, they WILL NOT WORK. And, get this. IDK the logic, but dude @ Acuity said different hubs support a different amount of these lights.

So, he said get one of these three hubs:

1.) Aeotec SmartThings Hub - Supports up to 64? of these lights
2.) Amazon Echo Hub - Supports up to 12? of these lights
3.) Google Nest Hub - Supports up to 5? of these lights

I can’t remember the exact numbers, which is why I have question marks above. I was already frustrated as all heck that this Acuity dude was telling me that I have to break out of my local-only philosophy to make these lights behave properly. Still am quite livid. But, in my rage, I remember it made sense to go with the Aeotec SmartThings hub. The dude @ Acuity said that’s what he ran in his house, and had Juno Connect lights at his house, and the experience was flawless.

So, a few days ago, I bought the damn Aeotec Hub – set it up – joined the lights to it – configured the SmartThings integration in HA – the damn thing works. It fricken works. No disconnects, no lights going offline, the lights just fricken work.

This was important for me because the reason I bought these lights to begin with was because they met the criteria to fit into my “Circadian Lighting” household. Every light in my house is Color Temp adjustable, and I have a service running in the background that takes the lights and transitions them slowly throughout the day from warm in the AM, to cool by midday, and back to warm at night. When I was looking to add more lighting in my living room, a buddy of mine showed me these and so I bought 8 of them. I bought 1 first, tested it briefly with Deconz, it worked in the test, so I ordered 7 more. It wasn’t until I had all 8 joined to Deconz and ran them for a few days or so that the disconnects surfaced, and I held onto these hoping for a firmware update one day. The dude @ Acuity said don’t hold your breath for a firmware update that’s going to make these work with Deconz/ZHA/Zigbee2MQTT… So, here we are.

If the Philips Hue Zigbee canless downlights were available at the time, and I knew these lights were going to suck this badly, I would have just went that route. But I am taking the sunk-cost route on these and instead of completely replacing them for approx $500, I decided to add this $140 hub and introduce a cloud component. I have the hub on an IoT VLAN that can’t talk to my trusted VLAN, so at least there’s that.

Anyhow, I now have Smart Lights again that don’t disconnect. I hope this helps out anyone else who is/was as frustrated as me!

Lol just seeing this now…

Is your resurrected SmartThings mesh proving to be rock solid for these downlights?

I will second this. After resurrecting my Smarttings hub, once I get a wafer connected, it stays connected well.

BUT, I still seem to hit limits on the number of wafers I can connect. Once past 25-26 range, it stops consistently adding devices.

Question for this sub-group: I am not a smartthings expert and lost most of my skills on that platform. My understanding is you have to change the driver to enable binding/grouping. Has anyone been successful in changing the driver for these wafers to then allow zigbee grouping and binding. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

If I can get group binding to work to the Inovelli Blues, I can expose these to Home Assistant (I know, now I’m in the cloud), but I could live with that for now.

Ouff, this seems like a big downgrade to me. Unless of course these lights plus the inovelli switches are all able to work locally with ST. But even then I think the ST integration on HA is through the cloud not local.

Your issue may be the device limit on ST. I forget the exact number off-hand but it’s somewhere in the 25-30 range for end-devices that can be connected directly to the hub. So if you’ve only got these lights on there for now and they aren’t designed to be routers, that could be your issue. Once you start adding router devices and it actually starts building a mesh you should be able to get up to around 200 total devices.

Honestly, I feel the reps on their end are full of BS. They’re tech support may only support 3 platforms, but zigbee goes well beyond that. Has anybody raised these issues on the Z2M github?

For the record, I don’t have any of these but I’ve been following along because I’d love to replace all the can lights I’ve got.

The device limit is 200 devices/account, not 25 - 30.

This may have changed this I used ST a few years back, but there used to be a limit on how many end-devices could directly connect to the hub which was somewhere in the 25-30 range.

I don’t know if these lights are capable of acting as routers or not which is why I mention it as a possibility. Once routers are in play the end devices can connect to both the hub and the routers and grow up to 200 total.

Z2M supported devices shows support for this WF6C fixture. However, from my experience, they go offline after a period of time.

The limit of directly connected ZigBee devices used to be 32 on the v2 and 64 on the v3 (now the aeotech) ST hub. At some point in the last couple years I believe the firmware was updated on the v2 to support 64 direct. EDIT: The V2 was updated to 64 with this firmware release near the end of 2020.

Regardless adding additional powered devices that support routing (smart plugs are most commonly used) would extend this and are referred to building out your mesh. It also offloads the hub from being overloaded having to communicate constantly with every child device. Each routing device can handle a limited number of children devices, usually at least 4, commonly 6 or more. If these wafer lights do not act as routing devices (sounds like they don’t) then it would be a good idea to add routing devices nearby to help them. A common rule of thumb is a routing device for every 4 to 6 non routing devices. ZigBee plugs from ewelink are popular. The sonoff usb powered repeaters are popular on the Hubitat forum.

Another thing to note is the Hubitat C7 and previous were all ZigBee 1.2 compatible. The ST v2 and v3 hubs are both ZigBee 3.0. The new Hubitat C8 is ZigBee 3.0 as well. If these wafer lights require zigbee 3.0 keep that in mind.

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Unless there are no other routing zigbee devices, which pretty much everybody, has, those devices ought to be connecting through something. I don’t think the odds of the direct connect limit being the issue is very great.

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I’m not so sure. It seems like the folks who are installing these (and then having issues to post in a forum) aren’t adding them to already established Zigbee meshes. The instances seem to be new construction where they want smart lights or retrofit. I’ve not seen where folks are sharing their zigbee network details. Perhaps Im reading into that (ie, they aren’t saying either way) but thats my impression.

Now you are probably right that the coordinator limits aren’t being hit either. I would just point out possible issues with signal strength (with limited or no repeaters) or zigbee 1.2 vs 3.0 issues as more likely than hub limits being hit.

Yeah, that’s a good point about other repeaters, particularly where a new hub was purchases or a hub was taken out of mothballs.

So, I’m super interested in this conversation. I have a few in a zigbee Home Assistant testbed with other devices, and have not yet seen any issues, but it sounds like I’d need a lot more for it to break. I’m planning on about 80 of them in a new house build. A, the Hues would cost me quite a bit more, but more importantly, the canless Hues are only in 6", and I want 4", and gimbal mounted options, which these appear to be the only UL listed option available.

I just brought my test system back up. The Junos show themselves as router devices, but I don’t yet have an example of them connecting to anything but my coordinator. It will likely take 24hrs to rebalance, then I will report back if they pick something else.

From my home I’ve tried to integrate these Juno Wafers into multiple meshes, rebuilding from scratch multiple times.

  1. Sonoff USB Zigbee “P” Version on Home Assistant ZHA,
    46 2-1 Switches -Firmware 2.08,
    14 Juno Connect Wafers,
    1 GLEDOPTO CCT LED Controller
    Zigbee Channel 25, Wifi 2.4 limited to Channel 1 and 6.
    RESULT: Strong Mesh, Good LQI on all devices, Binding Worked on switches, wafer and Gledopto CCT LED Controller, Groups Worked, but random Wafers would fall off the network.

Wafers stopped pairing/adding after 15-20. Adding them got more and more hit or miss, transitioning to all miss by 20.

  1. Skyconnect ZHA coordinator change: Home Assistant ZHA,
    46 2-1 Switches -Firmware 2.08,
    14 Juno Connect Wafers,
    Zigbee Channel 25, Wifi 2.4 limited to Channel 1 and 6.

RESULT: Strong Mesh, Good LQI, Binding Worked, Groups Worked, but random Wafers would fall off the network. Could not continue adding the Juno Wafers. Wafers stopped pairing/adding after 15-20. Adding them got more and more hit or miss, transitioning to all miss by 20.

  1. Sonoff USB Zigbee “P” Version on Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT,
    46 2-1 Switches -Firmware 2.08,
    14 Juno Connect Wafers,
    1 GLEDOPTO CCT LED Controller
    Zigbee Channel 25, Wifi 2.4 limited to Channel 1 and 6.
    RESULT: Strong Mesh, Good LQI on all devices, Binding Worked on switches, wafer and Gledopto CCT LED Controller, Groups Worked, but random Wafers would fall off the network.

Let’s isolate the wafers onto their own mesh network, on a new AEOTEC Smartthings hub.

  1. Aeotec smartthings controller with 26 to 30 Juno Connect Wafers on their own stand-alone zigbee mesh on channel 22.

Thought: Get Juno involved in troubleshooting and take out other variables to eliminate other potential conflicts/issues.

Note, the Z2MQTT mesh is built on 2-1 switches and a gledopto CCT controller, working fine on 2.14 on the Sonoff Coordinator (latest firmware on switches and coordinator).

Result: An island of zigbee mesh of just the juno connect wafers. Working fine, no dropped wafers, but no path at this moment to grouping, or binding. BUT I’ve hit a limit and adding more is a total hit-or-miss situation. First 15 add perfectly, after that, adding multiples at a time is near impossible.

In most of my rooms like the Kitchen there are 11 wafers. So when a wafer drops off the network and you’re using smart-bulb mode with binding, it sticks out like a sore thumb. It also means that “Re-Pairing” is a royal PITA. You have to re-add all 11, and if your mesh is already above 20, you can easily spend an hour trying multiple times, factory resetting the lights, trying to add them to the mesh, getting a couple to join, then having to power cycle the / reset the lights and try again.

Would I do it again? No. Dumb dimmable wafers with a switch selectable CCT would be the way I’d go. These hold so much promise, but my hope of getting 64 wafers and 48 switches onto a mesh is fading quickly.

-Jonathan

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