All the sexy stuff like ingress and entries to deconz inside HA is gone when deCONZ runs on bare metal on same or even on a different computer.
First the phoscon app. By default you access Phoscon on port 80 when deCONZ runs as daemon and via port 8080 when yoy run deconz-gui
Phoscon via ingress does not really give you anything. You need this as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Phoscon is an app you use when you add and remove devices and put them in groups. You are always home when you need to run it. You always need to physically be home to put devices in learning mode. I never need to run Phoscon when I am not home. As long as you know how the URL to your Phoscon you will never care about ingress for that.
Same with the deCONZ GUI. It is something you need when you are home tinkering.
Now the VNC access.
First you need to understand what deCONZ the GUI is vs the daemon.
Normally you will run the daemon which you will enable by default with
systemctl enable deconz
and start with
systemctl start deconz
When you want to use the deCONZ GUI software you need to access a desktop environment of the machine and stop the daemon and instead run the deCONZ gui. In terminal.
systemctl stop deconz
And then open the program deconz which should be added to the menu system of your Ubuntu.
To enable VNC access you simply need to install a VNC server on the Ubuntu
When you run the deCONZ gui software all the normal deCONZ functionality of the daemon also runs and it enables Phoscon. It seems that by default the Phoscon app runs on port 8080 when you run deCONZ GUi. You can change this if you want for both daemon and gui.
When you are done looking at the deCONZ software you simply exit the program and from a terminal start the daemon again.
systemctl start deconz
You can just let the GUI always start and run all the time. That is actually what the HA addon does. The Addon runs a small light desktop environment in a VNC session with the deCONZ gui. Maybe this is part of the stability problem with the Addon
Anyone with stability issues on the interface between Conbee 2 and the lights should not expect the Addon to be the root cause.
The problems I resolved with bare metal was mainly related to startup problems and connectivity to the Conbee 2. And the Addon crashing is surely also an Addon issue. Something inside that Addon is falling on its butt.
Your problems with stability seems to be in the realm of the Zigbee network and not an issue with deCONZ or how you run it.
Make sure you threat the Conbee stick as a radio transceiver with an antenna which is what it is. Place it where it gets good radio coverage and on a 1 meter USB extension wire away from noisy computers
And you may very well have a device in your network which is a shitty router. I did not get stable network until I got rid of all my Osram smart plugs or rather dumb-plugs and replaced them with Philips Hue equivalents. There are just mains powered devices on the market with crappy routing software
I also found that the Conbee II running on a 3m USB cord connected to a USB3 port on a Pi4 would be highly unstable. Plugged into USB2 and device seems to be more reliable (I had endless frustrations pairing Eurotronic TRVs).
What is the best practise when flashing the ConbeeII with new firmware? I am running HA with ZHA. Since I am running OSX, I can only flash via Pi4 directly (how) or I would need to use a docker image on Mac (or a VM) - any suggestions?
Interesting. I have, but now I have it working. I gave up on deCONZ entirely, as it was too slow, complicated and cumbersome to my taste.
I switched to the Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration, with my ConBee II on a USB3 port, and it’s working flawlessly ever since. Setup was a breeze, just enter the right port and that’s it. Pairing the sensor was also no problem.
@KennethLavrsen Well, I do have quality Draytek router and APs. I do have stick on 3m cable as far as I can from server rack… the problem might be indeed quality of devices… all of these are Ikea bulbs, plugs and switches, mix of Ikea and Aqara motion sensors… Majority of problems are indeed with G10 bulbs, E27 bulbs and LED drivers bevave quite OK.
I’m also sort of used to deconz software, perhaps trying ZHA, as it works with conbee II is another option… I’ll yet try to spend some time trying to stabilise this setup with new Ubuntu server running deconz first.
When I talk about routers then I mean routers in the Zigbee world. All mains powered devices can act as routers in the Zigbee mesh network. If just one of these have dodgy software the mesh is broken and you get a crappy network. And the key thing here is that the device that causes the issue may be working just fine itself but devices connected via this device are unreliable.
Firmware upgrade anything you can. And experiment by taking devices out that you think can be a problem. I had a problem often with one specific Philips Hue bulb that would not be controlled once every month. The problem went away when I replaced an older IKEA 1000 lumen bulb that acted as a router between this bulb and the Conbee.
In the zigbee world the hub is called the coordinator. The devices that can repeat signals in the mesh are called routers and are always mains powered. And all the sensors and remotes that are battery powered are End Devices. They do not route as that would drain their batteries.
Also note that if you are one of those that has family members turning off wall switches lamp switches then you break the mesh and it takes a while, sometimes hours, to rebuild a reliable mesh again. All mains powered devices that can act as routers must always be powered. You have no control of how things are routed.
Oh, that makes things more clear!
So as you can see from my previous post I’m pretty much bound to Ikea ecosystem (45 devices) and a bit Aqara (9 devices). Issue might be with firmware, as I did not figured out how to make upgrade not using tradfri bridge. There is a lot of articles how to make it in deconz, using OTA plugin, but frankly speaking I feel lost while dealing with somehow ciphered device codes and firmware versions…
All my devices are permanently powered, I use small bridges mounted inside physical switches to prevent them from being powered down. So once the network is up, it should be stable. However as long as I was using deconz in the same VM as HA, every restart of HA was causing also deconz restart… and perhaps network rebuild?. Now it should be more stable with deconz installation separated from HA. I already have feeling, that it might be a biot more stable after few hours… but lets see if not something that I just would like to see
Same here. Deconz was stable, but for the last two months there has been a lot of problems. I get messages like this in the log, “08:08:19:161 Remove websocket 172.30.32.1:46234 after error Unknown error”. If the error message was more informative, I could probably do something about it.
You go to the ZHA discussion or the Zigbee2MQTT discussion and you will find equally many people reporting poblems. There is no perfect or complete solution and your choice of solution will depend on both your use case and the actual devices you need support for.
The stability of the mesh between the devices and the coordinator is to my best knowledge mainly handled by the firmware in the dongle and the devices. If you have problems with the mesh and connectivity it will be the same whether the software is any of the 3 ( deCONZ, Zigbee2MQTT, or ZHA ). And what is the perfect solution today can change tomorrow when one of the 3 gets an enhancement or a new bug. Or you buy a new device that is not supported by your current solution.
I have personally tried all 3 but I tried both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT a year ago and they have moved along a lot. So have deCONZ. The most important criteria is which devices you need support for. And second criteria is the features you need and the hardware dongle you have bought.
Advantages with deCONZ (not including the issues with the Addon) is that deCONZ is a designed so it can be a stand-alone system. It does not need Home Assistant for basic features like grouping lights and smart plugs and basic control by switches (remotes). deCONZ running like this is very very rock solid stable. And then you can let Home Assistant do the advanced automations. Zigbee2MQTT cannot do this. And ZHA is part of Home Assistant and starts and crashes with Home Assistant.
HA does talk directly to deCONZ rest API. Phoscon is just another API consumer acting front end for deCONZ. The issue lies in a combination of the lower levels of deCONZ and the add-on, not in Phoscon.
I have just come from a stint in ZHA, when something is not right they say it is Deconz.
In saying that it can’t be all firmware and devices as using the same Conbee II stick, same firmware, same devices I have a whole different set of issues with Deconz than I did with ZHA.
Devices that never “disappeared” in ZHA do all the time in Deconz. One of note is the Visonic MCT-340e.
I have around 100 devices and never saw a device disappear as in not visible in the Phoscon app
I have seen devices not available. Battery devices can be unavailable until you wake them up. But is it rare and they normally appear after a while.
And I have had lights that ignorred commands and that was cured by replacing the bad devices I wrote about above. I have never seen a device that was paired disappear.
The only open issue I have with deCONZ at the moment it problems pairing new Philips Motion sensors ( I have an open github on that ) but once they are paired that are 100% reliable in my 100 device installation.
Not as yet, I am trying to resolve a number of other issues first.
I refer to you comments about bad routers. Why is it one of my downlights which was super stable in ZHA on the Conbee II, I have about 15 other lights of the same model, which is directly connected to the coordinates, about 4m clear line of site of the Conbee, is going unavailable?
Yep sorry. But if he does not want to use deCONZ/phoscon and have HA talk directly to the stick that’s a solution.
I really like this integration but there’s the addon issue that stops every so often that does not help
