Xiaomi gateway setup help needed

Hardware
1

Just received a Xiaomi gateway kit. Looking forward to using it with HA, but I’m stuck at the start. Has anyone else had trouble getting it setup with the Xiaomi app? I’ve followed the instructions but it’s failing every time.

I’m in the US, using an Asus rt-n56u router. Downloaded the Mi home app from the iOS App Store (version 4.7.0). I’ve tried on both an iPhone 6 and an older iPad. I can see the ssid being broadcast by the gateway, so it seems the hardware is working.

At a loss…

2

this sounds familiar! if you haven’t already, switch your region to Mainland China within the Mi Home app. Then with the Gateway plugged in, restart it (hold button on it for 5 seconds I think) and try again within the app

3

Yep, my location is ‘mainland’. The list of devices available to add doesn’t even include the gateway if you don’t do this.

I’ve reset the gateway with the button a number of times (I’ve been fighting with this thing for hours).

The weird thing is, everything seems to be going fine until the point where the app instructs you to connect to the gateway’s ssid. As soon as I do that, it stops quickly flashing yellow and goes to a state where it flashes three times, pauses, then three times again, etc. I’ve watched my router’s wifi status page and the gateway never connects to the local network.

4

I have the Asus RT-AC87U router and also had a lot of trouble connecting the Xiaomi gateway to my router.

I have a Guest Network (WiFi) for my IOT devices, but it refused to connect to that. After about 10 tries I gave up and tried the main WiFi connection and it worked first try.

Hope that helps, here’s some more info on the Guest network:

  • It did have access to the local network.
  • The SSID was “IOT”, maybe it was too short a name?
5

my wifi ssid is 14 characters. I also tried setting up a wifi hotspot on my iphone that had an ssid 6 characters long. Niether had any special characters or numbers.

6

I have my xiaomi gateways on an SSID (and separate vlan) called IoT too. The name is irrelevant.

If you can’t get them to connect to your router, hotspot a phone (you will need two devices, one for the hotspot and one running the mi-home app), connect it, and update the firmware on the gateway. This is a common fix discussed in other threads on this forum.

Other things to keep in mind:
Make sure the SSID is visible (you can hide it again after it’s connected)
Make sure you don’t have MAC address filtering enabled on the WiFi (or add the gw to the list if you do)
Make sure there are available IP addresses in the DHCP pool on the IoT subnet
To connect home assistant to the gateway, home assistant MUST have an interface in the same network/vlan as the gateway. They seem to rely on broadcast traffic. No matter what I tried (including specifying the IP address to alleviate it trying to do discovery), I could not get HASS to talk to the GW across a router.

7

I did try to connect it to a hotspot on my iphone with the app on the iPad. I couldn’t get it to connect to the phone either. Exact same failure mode. I’m really starting to think I got a bad gateway.

I got it through gearbest. Anyone know how good/bad they are about returns or exchanges?

8

I`m having the very same problem. Did you finally manage to connect the gateway?

9

be sure to chose a 2,4 ghz net… then it works :slight_smile: