Just a quick post with my personal experience with both Conbee II and SkyConnect dongles. I have been running Conbee stick, ZHA & ~30 mostly Aqara devices for a couple of years, and everything has been rock solid. The radio is in an extension cable, stuck onto the wall about 1 meter above the floor.
Wanting to support Nabu Casa, I got a SkyConnect stick, and followed the radio migration process in the ZHA GUI. The new radio was inserted into the extension cable, in exactly the same place. The migration was seamless. A few hours after migration, a few end devices became unavailable and needed to be repaired. Once repaired, they worked well, expect for 2 devices, that were a fair distance away from the coordinator. I have 4 router devices and left the network for about a week to sort itself out. I was left with 1 device that just kept dropping off the network, and it was clearly a range issue. It is a motion sensor in a metal letterbox about 15 meters, through an external wall, away from the coordinator. No physical devices were moved from their locations throughout this process.
I then migrated back to the Conbee stick, and this device has been in the network ever since.
So in summary, my $0,02 worth, the Conbee II stick currently has a better range then the SkyConnect radio.
Thanks for this info. I was actually curious about it as well.
I do have the skyconnect but have not yet hooked it up. My plan was to keep my current zigbee stick and use the skyconnect just for thread/matter. I’m just not sure if having them both will conflict on the wireless channels.
When I get my first thread based matter device I’ll probably have to find out the hard way.
This is exactly my experience with SkyConnect. I have moved back to the Conbee II. I might try again in future. Depends if an issue is found that can be fixed.
I’m using Conbee II and no issues at all too. Have a SkyConnect and yet to setup. Is it possible to leave the Conbee running Zigbee network and add the SkyConnect for thread and as a second Zigbee network? I’d like to have the option to leave all my 50 devices on Conbee and only add new devices only to SkyConnect.
For Zigbee, you can’t have two ZHA instances. If the conbee is currently running under deconz or z2m, then adding the SkyConnect under ZHA is simple. If the conbee is running under ZHA then you would need to use z2m for the SkyConnect zigbee functions.
Having exactly the same experience. Half of my Zigbee devices stopped working after migrating to SkyConnect (all of them further away from the SkyConnect device). Removing and adding them again did not do the trick. Interviewing took a long time, and if successful (often not) the devices were not responsive. Lots of these error messages:
Failed to call service switch/turn_on. Failed to send request: Failed to deliver message: <EmberStatus.DELIVERY_FAILED: 102>
Never had any issues with Conbee II, so now back to Conbee for now.
Wish I had read this thread before I switched yesterday. 10 hours trying to make stuff work again. Some things still not working, other unstable, and wife not happy. Dread the effort to revert to conbee, but that was a lot more stable.
so I have SkyConnect currently for ZHA and Thread/Matter. The device is giving me fits and gray(er) hair
Can I plug in a cobee or Sonoff Zigbee dongle, keep Thread/Matter on the SkyConnect and then migrate my ZHA configuration to use the new dongle, or do I need to drop ZHA and go Z2M?
Not worried about having to reset and reconfigure everything … currently about 30 devices mostly hue bulbs … just want to know if I can keep things the way I have or is z2m going to be necessary … if so time to read more
You can have a separate stick for zha and keep SkyConnect for Thread. Just point the zha config to the new stick.
No need for z2m.
But…
With two sticks, it is a good time to evaluate z2m before making the switch permanent. Setup z2m alongside zha and kick the tires. If you decide to keep ZHA, remove z2m and point ZHA to the new stick. If you decide to keep z2m, just start migrating devices at your leisure.
Thanks a ton! This is what I assumed – but wanted to make sure it wasn’t hopeful thinking. While fairly new to HA I’ve been using other systems (Hubitat, etc) for years and once in a while old knowledge leaks into new thoughts and magic smoke billows from my RPi … making sure I don’t completely cock it up
Going to start looking at z2m and a few of the guides I’ve found while waiting for a dedicated Zigbee stick to be ordered and shipped
If going Sonoff, go with the ZBDongle-P. The “E” is the same chip as the SkyConnect. Flash it with the 20221226 firmware.
Also, the new Conbee III is the same SILabs chip as SkyConnect, but reportedly runs a different firmware, and is not supported in ZHA yet, but might be in 2023.12.
THanks! I ended up getting the ComBee II and will test it out on z2m with sky still doing thread … dongle will be here Thursday so I have a weekend project LOL
