Conbee II Device Path Changed

Configuration Zigbee
1

I had ZHA set up with a Conbee II, and it was working beautifully!

All my devices eventually paired, with only minor troubles. I had managed to create Zigbee groups for some of my lights. All the sensors, remotes, and buttons were firing events properly. Performance was lightning fast!!

I had previously been using Zigbee2MQTT with a CC2531, it worked pretty well, and had been stable for the best part of a year.

Anyway, I had to shut down the server to perform some maintenance, so the Zigbee network and HA were down. I took this opportunity to unplug my old CC2531 and after a few hours, booted the server back up.

After booting, my ZHA devices had all disappeared, and after further investigation, it seemed the Conbee II stick, which used to be on the device path /dev/ttyacm1, had been renamed to /dev/ttyacm0.

I had a quick google, and saw that you could update the device path for the ZHA integration (I’d added it through the Home Assistant UI) could be updated in /config/.storage/core.device_entries.

This worked, pretty much all of my Zigbee devices came back online over the next 15 minutes.

However, after testing some things out, it seems my Zigbee groups are no longer responsive, alsos zigbee network performance is dire at best (we’re talking motion sensors not firing, or firing 45 seconds after motion, bulbs slow to toggle, remotes either not working at all, or very intermittently).

I’m hoping that network performance will improve the longer the network is active, as the mesh will eventually attempt to route and balance itself.

My main concern is the zigbee groups. I’ve tried removing devices from the groups… which fails. Deleting and recreating the groups, then re-adding the devices - but they fail to add to the group. At this point I’m stuck for ideas… the only thing I can think of is deleting all my groups (there are several), and factory resetting the related devices, and repairing them.

Before I took such drastic measures, I wanted to see if anyone had any insight into what might have happened here, and if there’s anything I should attempt first?

TIA

2

I went ahead and removed the group devices from ZHA, then factory reset them and paired them again.

I was then able to create some new zigbee groups, and add the devices to them. My guessing is that the groups stored on the devices, and the groups in ZHA somehow became out of sync. Maybe I edited some groups before the network had become fully online.

It would be great if the ZHA interface could check if devices are active on the network before allowing users to edit them. A little validation and a few sanity checks go a long way.

Edit to add: As I said previously, I expected the zigbee network performance to improve as time went on… after a few hours of being up it’s really nippy again. It feels a lot faster that Zigbee2MQTT did (don’t get me wrong, Zigbee2MQTT wasn’t slow, it performed more than ok).