Friends of Hue switches unreliable on deconz

Hardware
1

Hi everyone,

I own two friends of hue switches, both work great as long as they are connected to hue bridge.

I can connect them to deconz, the work, but are extremely unreliable.

Anyone any idea what to do to make them work reliable on deconz?

ip

2

How far away from the conbee stick are they? Do you have other mains powered devices in the conbee zigbee mesh?

3

Distance doesn’t seem to make a difference - tried it in the same room as conbee II, but also two stories away (with at least one mains powered device as mesh point “on the way”
Currently (still testing the setup) the only mains powered devices are conbee II, an Osram plug and one or two light bulbs. The rest is mainly aqara sensors - battery powered

So the behavior I see isn’t what is to expected?

4

Zigbee meshes take time to heal. Small meshes (less than 10 devices) usually take about 1-2 hours to fully heal and propagate routes. So, if you move the devices closer to your hub, you’ll want to wait at least an hour or two before thinking that the results are accurate.

Further, FoH devices are ZLL profile devices. The reason they work will with the Hue hub is that the Hue hub is a fully certified ZLL profile compliant controller. Other controllers like the Conbee II, CC2531, and others support both ZLL and ZHA meshes, but you may experience issues as there are distinct differences in the two profiles when it comes to messaging. Your Osram plug is (I’m guessing) a Smart+ plug, which means that it is a ZLL profile device that you have on a ZHA profile controller. Most likely what’s happening here is that the ConbeeII is sending messages using the ZHA profile (as it should because you have a mix of ZLL and ZHA devices) and the Osram plug may be mangling those messages during re-transmission to the switches.

If they are working well on the Hue hub, I’d leave them there and just keep your Aqara sensors on deConz. I actually run this type of setup: For my Ikea bulbs (which tend to SUCK in a ZHA mesh), I have them paired to my Hue hub. All the rest of my sensors (contact, motion, humidity, etc) are on my ZHA mesh hosted by HA (using a Nortek stick). What this does is allows devices that use the ZLL profile to stay on ZLL and my ZHA profile sensors stay on the ZHA mesh. This way, there’s no mangling of messages. I haven’t had a single device drop off either network (aside from an Ikea Driver that actually went bad) in years now.

As long as you are using two different channels for your meshes, they should work fine together.

2 Likes
5

Hi code-in-progress,

thanks for the heads up - tried it closer to conbee again and it worked.
But changing (and adding more) mains powered devices didn’t help to make it work upstairs.

A few days ago I found this in the changelog for deconz 2.05.85 (deconz on hassio is on 2.05.84):

  • Support ZGP (Friend of Hue) switches to route through the mesh network #3418

And with further searching around:

this seems to be (have been) a long standing issue with deconz and friends of hue switches

More details on Zigbee Green Power and the corresponding cluster ID 0x0021 can be found in this document (no, I didn’t read it that 186 pager completely - only some preface parts :wink: )

So for now I’ll wait a few more days for .85 being released on hassio - and then test again.

Ingo

7

I still have the same issue you had last year. Seems like the ZGP support isn’t still added to deconz. My FoH switch will only connect directly to the Conbee stick.

Did you manage to solve your issue?

8

Hi Darryl,

no, unfortunately I’m still having that issue… (and therfore still use my hue bridge for those scenarios)

Tried to catchup on that topic - according to issue 436 it has been added for the v2.11.x milestone, but it’s still open.

Let’s keep fingers crossed and hope that this new merge will (finally) fix this issue.

Ingo

9

Hmm, too bad!

How did you setup? Do you have your lights set-up with the Conbee stick and the ZGP switch connected to Hue bridge? Or all your lights and ZGP switches with Hue Bridge?

10

currently everthing “connected” to or controlled via zgp is connectd to the hue bridge - once the new version has landed I will try to do it via deconz again (have a few “spare” FOH switches I plan to use once they work with deconz)

11

Damn it, I just migrated all my lights from hue Bridge to deconz… I can move everything back again I see.

Hope they can fix this long outstanding issue asap.

12

I was in the lucky situation, that the first room I tried to use it in was the one the furthest away from the conbee - so I stopped before moving loads of stuff around.

Let’s hope the best for the next release.