Google Wi-Fi and Elgato Key Light Air

During lockdown, I decided to (somewhat impulsively) purchase an Elgato Key Light Air to improve my lighting on video calls. Unfortunately, I ran into some trouble setting it up with my Google Wi-Fi Mesh Network.

The Elgato Key Light Air relies on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi to pair. You can do this with either the Elgato Control Center mobile app or the macOS/PC application; either way the device needs to be using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. This is where the problems start!

Google Wi-Fi prefers 5GHz by default and will only fall back to 2.4GHz when it needs to. This means if the device you’re pairing with support 5GHz you’re pretty stuck - unless you can force the device itself to only use 2.4GHz.

I’m sure that is possible at a software level if you want to poke around with your network drivers however I managed to do it by simply walking to the edge of my Wi-Fi coverage (my garden) and completing the pairing there.

This works because 5GHz has a smaller range (but faster speeds) than 2.4GHz, so at the edge of your network your device will be forced to use the 2.4GHz frequency bands.