Hi All,
Some of you have mentioned in recent days an inability to connect to WeMo devices. We have traced this problem and it appears it's two related issues outside of the control of CastleOS.
The primary cause of the issue is that WeMo has not implemented the UPnP spec correctly, and is in fact publishing malformed UPnP data over the local network.
For a long time, we've been able to account for this by using Windows' built-in UPnP discovery capability, using a library called ManagedUPnP. This was a bit of a hassle, as we're using that outdated library only for WeMo, while the rest of our UPnP capabilities use a newer and much better library from Intel. ManagedUPnP is what's called a "wrapper" around Windows COM components for UPnP discovery. The tech details aren't as important as it the fact that ultimately it means CastleOS is using Windows itself to discover WeMo devices. The benefit was that the Windows' discovery worked because it was flexible, while other more "strict" libraries would fail.
That brings us to the current issues. It appears an update to Windows 10 means it is no longer able to properly discover WeMo devices, as it too has become "strict". We've tested two different Windows 10 machines which failed, as well as a Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machine which both succeeded. So we're confident this problem is localized to Windows 10 users, which do include those who use the CastleHUB. In fact, you can test this yourself in Windows 10 via Windows Explorer. Go to the Network view, and you'll see your WeMo devices there. Right click on them, select Properties, and Windows will throw an error.
At this point we can't offer a timeline of when or even IF this will get fixed. Nor can we promise that a future update to older versions of Windows will not mean the same thing won't happen to them. We and others have been asking WeMo to fix their firmware for over a year - and that was just for convenience sake. Now it's a matter of it working at all going forward.
So at this point we can only offer two recommendations:
1) Stop buying WeMo products until they commit to resolving this issue once and for all.
2) Put pressure on WeMo to fix this problem on their community forum:
http://community.wemo.com/t5/WEMO-Hardware/bd-p/WEMO_Hardware (I will be leaving a new comment about this there, you can feel free to reply to that.)
I'm sorry we don't have a better answer at the moment, I wish this was a simple fix on our end but it is not.
Thanks,
Chris
edited by ccicchitelli on 12/13/2016