After a LOT of experimentation, I think I figured it out.
I have 14 mmWave sensors that are creating a LOT of traffic, so much, that it’s affecting my other automations, hence the need for a second Z2M instance.
These particular devices didn’t play nice with a second Z2M instance using the trailing"/" method, even with an external converter to handle the newer devices…it’s an ongoing battle with these things.
So…
I made the second instance an “Edge” version, figuring it would have the latest and greatest support.
Suddenly all my errors dissappeared and I now had 2 working instance, no errors and all devices showing up in their respective Z2M devices list.
However, what I couldn’t work out was why, under the HA > System > Devices tab, I could only see the zigbee devices from my second Z2M instance…even though I had configured a different base_topic in the Add On > Z2M > Config “mqtt section”…turns out, this is ignored and has to be set in the configuration.yaml for the respective Z2M instances.
Summary of what worked:
Install 1st instance of Z2M
then go to…
HA > Settings > Add On > Z2M > Configuration tab
Edit the 2 sections, Options & Network as follows
Options
-
data_path - /config/zigbee2mqtt (this was the default path created for me)
-
socat - left this alone
-
mqtt - mqtt://192.168.20.15:1883 (this was my mosquitto address)
-
serial - /dev/ttyUSB0 (my first sonoff coordinator)
Network
port - 8485
Instance 1 notes
-
Mqtt, this is the section that confused me the most, I eventually stripped everything out apart from the server address, I added the details I needed later, in the configuration.yaml file as they were being ignored here.
-
This is the minimum details in the Z2M config tab that are needed to get Z2M running.
Second instance prep
You will have a folder in the HA file system for the first Z2M instance, as denoted above in the data_path.
Manually create a second folder for the second Z2M-Edge instance, this is so you can edit the configuration.yaml files independently later, I called mine, zigbee2mqtt2
Install 2nd instance of Z2M, Edge version
then go to…
HA > Settings > Add On > Z2M-Edge > Configuration tab
Edit the 2 sections, Options & Network as follows
Options
-
data_path - /config/zigbee2mqtt2 (edit to point to the newly created folder)
-
socat - left this alone
-
mqtt - mqtt://192.168.20.15:1883 (same as first instance)
-
serial - /dev/ttyUSB1 (my second sonoff coordinator)
Network
port - 8486 (default is 8485, I incremented by 1 for the second Z2M-Edge instance)
Each instance will now have their own folder in the HA file system.
In each folder there will be a configuration.yaml file, we now need to edit these
Configuration.yaml - First instance
The only thing I changed was the mqtt section:
I added my username and password and most importantly of all, the base_topic, which was being ignored previously
mqtt:
server: mqtt://192.168.20.15:1883
base_topic: zigbee2mqtt
user: mqttuser
password: mqttpassword
Configuration.yaml - Second instance
I edited the same values, only this time, changing the base_topic to something different
mqtt:
server: mqtt://192.168.20.15:1883
base_topic: zigbee2mqtt2
user: mqttuser
password: mqttpassword
I made no further changes, including inside the settings section of the Z2M web UI, I just used out of the box.
