First of all, big THANK YOU to
@RMerlin for letting us all jump into the mesh world!
I'm late to the party and spent the last night trying to get this working by resurrecting my old AC68U and flashing dirty my AC5300 to convert it into the main node.
The process went fine, AC5300 showed the AiMesh button, AC68U was reset and brought to N-1 version of ASUS firmware, took a couple of minutes and I got wireless back-haul working. Tested automatic upgrading of the AC68U node and it upgraded fine but it felt like it took quite some time to do so.
Then the issues started:
* Wemo app lost all of my lights
* Google Play Music would see a few of my Chromecast devices but none of the Home ones
* Looked for videos on AiMesh as it was my first time setting it up and wanted to see if my manual way of keeping 2.5, 5-1, 5-2 was a good idea, especially when AC68U has only dual-band device.... but YouTube was stuttering.
I figured out lazy is no good, super lazy for way too long doesn't make things better. I must have dirty flashed my AC5300 for years. Even the clean flashes were followed by nvram-save.sh restore. Sooo, it was time for the ultimate reset.
Full reset on both routers. Setting AC5300 router and WiFi password (just one, as per the Wizard) finally giving into the magic of Dual-Band Smart Connect. No other customization, apart from entering my Bell Fibe PPPoE credentials. Adding the AC68U took again a couple of minutes and appeared to be working fine. The last thing I did around 2am was to check the devices and saw them spread across the 2 nodes - mainly 50-ish of them that used 2.4Ghz (left updating the ones that used 5Ghz for today).
Well, the end of good news again:
* got out of bed to turn off the lights as Wemo app didn't see any of my dimmers again
* tried to see if Play Music would cast to my Lenovo smart display but again, it saw only 2 of the Chromcasts downstairs
I didn't have time to see if there's any correlation between which node my phone was connected to vs the smart devices.
Any pointers to what worked for you folks when setting up wireless back-haul over AC5300 and AC68U or similar would be greatly appreciated!
Note: turned off the AC68U to browse this forum as Speedtest was showing 6-8Mbps when connected to the AC68U and as soon as it connected downstairs to the AC5300 I was back to 450Mbps up/down.
Thanks a lot!