Lifx bulb integration not working

I feel like I’ve really gone down a rabbit hole here.

Ubiquiti setup
WAPs: U6-LRs

  • Lifx lights connected to a 2.4GHz only wireless network
  • Lifx lights all have static IPs via DHCP reservations
  • multicast enhancement turned on for wireless network

Router: UDM-Pro

  • Lifx lights on subnet 192.168.30.0/24
  • Home Assistant on subnet 192.168.50.0/24
  • Home Assistant IP 192.168.50.8
  • Firewall rules block the VLANs from communicating by default
  • Firewall rule allows Home Assistant to reach all of the Lifx subnet
  • Firewall rule allows all of the Lifx subnet to reach Home Assistant

I can see the lights in the Lifx app no problem, even when my phone is connected to a different local subnet (192.168.10.0/24 with firewall rule to allow subnet to reach all of the Lifx subnet).

When I open Home Assistant, all 3 lights show up as discovered devices, but they show up as “HomeKit Controller” devices. When I click on one to configure it, I get “Please wait, starting configuration wizard for integration” where it just sits here and spins. Eventually, I get “Config flow could not be loaded: Unknown error.”

After googling problems with integrating Lifx lights, I discovered that I may need to specify

lifx:
light:
- broadcast: 192.168.30.X

for each of my lights in the configuration.yaml file, due to me having these lights on a different subnet than Home Assistant. I remembered that I actually had to do this a couple of years ago when I first tried out Home Assistant and this is what got it working. That was a long time ago with basically a completely different environment. But this didn’t produce any different behavior or results this time.

Questions:

  1. Are these lights supposed to be showing up as “HomeKit Controller” devices?
  2. Is it possible that this is a Home Assistant issue and not a network/device issue?

The weird thing is that the devices absolutely do show up, even at first boot of a fresh Home Assistant install. But once again they show up as HomeKit devices, which is weird to me, and I can’t configure them. It just times out.

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