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anyone having trouble with thread after tvOS 16.5 update?

J

joeblough

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 30, 2006
626
441
title says it all. for some reason after 16.5 my appleTV4K no longer wants to be a border router for thread. i just bought a HomePod mini, and it's working fine as a border router.

i think this rules out interference and iCloud issues. thread worked great for me for more than a year so i think it must have been the 16.5 update that hosed things. also, i've updated the firmware on all the thread devices that had firmware updates after things stopped working properly (the appleTV would assume the border router role briefly after rebooting it, which gave me enough time to do firmware updates.)

i did not upgrade my home to the new architecture yet. i've got another home where i'm using an iPad as a HomeKit hub and don't want to lose that. i understand that 16.5 brought a new thread specification to the appleTV so i wonder if they borked something up.
 
ColdCase said:
Will the ATV pick up the slack if you power down the HomePod mini? They do negotiate.
Click to expand...

i did try that and immediately lost the thread network (per the Eve app). so i'm pretty sure something is borked in the appleTV.

what's weird is that the eve app can't really identify the border router - it doesn't know what room it's in, and there's no identifying info. the Discovery app does show the HomePod under "_meshcop._udp" which i read somewhere are the advertisements for border routers. the appleTV shows up there too, but clearly it's not connected to the thread network.
 
If you have more than one Home set up on the network, that may confuse thread. If you do, power them down and restart the AppleTV.

My experience is that it often takes a day for thread to settle down
 
i have 3 homes but they are on different networks and physically separate from one another. however i did have a bogus extra home in the app with no devices. so not sure if home.app saw that home as on the same network.

i power cycled the appletv multiple times before i got the HomePod to no avail.

interestingly at about 11PM last night the thread network disappeared. i didn't notice this until i woke up in the morning. restarting the HomePod fixed that. so something is messed up here, but hard to understand what.

it's absolutely stupid that there are no user-visible logs for this stuff. i'm sure i could figure it out right away if i could get some idea of what the appleTV and the HomePod are doing.

looking back in Eve though, i see that there were always long stretches where particular devices were not responding, which is weird because every time i've tried to use one of these thread devices i've never gotten a not responding message. in addition one of the devices is a door sensor and that's how i realized something was wrong - i was getting notifications from the garage door opener, but not from the door sensor. that's definitely something new. oh well.
 
Eve support told me that addressing get screwed up when there is more than one home in the area. They suggest turning the other homes off, let the troublesome home settle down, then turn the other homes back on.

Worked for me.
 
@ColdCase interesting - it seems that deleting that extra bogus home cleaned things up. one of the 3 homes is going away this month, and then i can delete the other one (though i'm guest on that home, not owner) if things keep acting up.

from the eve app it looks like perhaps both the appleTV and HomePod are now thread border routers but it's not easy to tell since they are not identified by name in the app. however, there are 2 routers with different signal strengths to the various endpoints so that seems like both are online.

i haven't had "not reachable" with my thread devices for a few days, but notifications from one of them (a door switch) have stopped coming, so something is still messed up. but that might just be normal HomeKit BS.
 
HDFan said:
Apple TV logs are available via XCode/Devices and Simulators.
Click to expand...

i'll look into this but somehow my Xcode install is messed up on my mac studio. there's updates pending but they won't apply; i always get the error that the package was "deleted since being downloaded" immediately after it starts to download the package.

anyway one way or another things have settled down. i should see if the thread network stays up if i unplug the HomePod now.
 
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