Elelabs Zigbee Shield

Hardware
1

I’m having issues getting the Elelabs Zigbee shield working. As soon as the yaml config entry:

# Elelabs ZigBee RPi Shield 
zha:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyAMA0
  database_path: zigbee.db
  baudrate: 57600

The UI locks up on restart. Using the CLI to tail the logs gives this:

2018-08-13 20:02:54 DEBUG (MainThread) [bellows.uart] Sending: b’1ac038bc7e’
2018-08-13 20:03:03 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.setup] Setup of zha is taking over 10 seconds.

Has anyone actually got this working under a recent hass,io install?

2

Should you have raspberry pi 3, did you disable bluetooth uart? I got Elelabs Zigbee shield few days ago and it worked without any problems by following their manual.

Edit: Also, did you just wait long enough? After I inserted Zigbee shield, home assistant downloaded and installed zigpy and bellows and that took a while.

3

Yep, I disabled the Bluetooth UART in the config text file as per the instructions, which was a bit of a bummer as I was planning on using that. Support replied that the would send me a troubleshooting script but I haven’t seen that yet. They also said you can move the BT UART somehow.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll check to see if zigpy and bellows installed (if I can work out how) but I tried it many hours after I installed it.

Question: With this shield (or a similar one) is it practical to use HA as a Zigbee hub? Wondering how advanced the software is. I have a Zigbee smart lock and a bunch of Xiaomi Zigbee sensors working with Smartthings, but I would like to migrate to HA/Hass.io if possible.

4

About UART, I had to study the subejct a bit since I am not too familiar with Raspberry Pi. There is two UARTs, one with more “oomph” (PL011 uart) and one with less (mini UART). Stock configuration uses PL011 UART for bluetooth and mini UART for serial port. It is possible to either: 1) disable mini UART and use PL011 for serial port which disables bluetooth or 2) swap UARTs which keeps bluetooth functioning but bluetooth may be slower. So I think you can keep bluetooth and use Zigbee shield but do not quote me on that. And then of course 3) get USB version and you have your own third UART with enough oomph.

  1. is achieved by writing “dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt” to config
  2. is achieved by writing “dtoverlay=pi3-miniuart-bt”. Elelabs instructions uses this.

Bummer though you can’t get it working, don’t know what’s the problem :frowning: Well, the error message “Setup of zha is taking over 10 seconds.” I got plenty of those before bellows and zigpy were installed. I was sure that something is wrong. I realized that stuff is being installed when I SSHd in and took o look of running processes “ps -a” and there were python + install related stuff going. This was when I installed manually home assistant to raspbian. I have another test bench with hassio, that worked without any problems but I think I did not try to use Zigbee shield in the beginning so it could’ve downloaded everything while I was doing other stuff.

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