Hi, BillZ – Thanks for reaching out, and welcome to the Community Forum! 

Sounds like you've got a bit of a frustrating situation here, but I think there's a pretty simple solution! Since you're trying to add Gen 1 units to your network, what I believe you're seeing is a consequence of those units being on a much older native firmware version. We've made a lot of changes and improvements to the firmware over the last few years, including a complete overhaul of our mesh infrastructure with the introduction of TrueMesh on v.2.0 (for reference, we're now on v.3.7!)

As a workaround in your particular case, I believe that all you'll need is to hardwire or daisy-chain those Gen 1 units to your existing Gen 2 gateway (or a network switch) and then attempt to add them via the app. By using the ethernet connection, we can bypass some of the wireless restrictions that exist between older and newer firmware versions. Once they're added to the network, a firmware update will let them start meshing wirelessly as expected.

If you'd like any assistance with that, or you see any issues even after giving that a try, please call us directly at 877-659-2347 and we'll work on a solution with you. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention, and welcome again to the forums!

Kindly,
Drew, eero Community Team