HA not detecting USB dongle, other computers do

Configuration
1

Hi All,

I’m new to HA, but not systems and networking.

I purchased an entry level Zigbee USB dongle (Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2 / Plus-E) and some entry level Zigbee lights to start with Zigbee.

If I plug the dongle into any computer, it shows up as "Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2 ". When I plug it into Home Assistant, it does not show up at all in the WebUI.

I tried adding the ZHA integration, and in the tutorials I’ve read/watched, it should show up, but it does not. Adding the path manually with /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 does not work.

My HA set-up is a virtual machine using an image from the HA website. The hypervisor is Proxmox. Server hardware is a Dell PowerEdge R720. I know this is not the officially supported configuration, but I’ve seen posts of many people using this same dongle with this same configuration.

When I plug the device into my laptop, it shows up.

When I change the hypervisor’s USB-Passthrough to point at a different virtual machine, it shows up in the virtual machine.

It does not show up in the HA WebUI. I have console access to the HA virtual machine, but I don’t know how to navigate “Home Assistant OS 15.0” in the command line. I’ve got experience command line experience with UNIX like systems, Cisco iOS, Juniper, and Windows, but HA OS CLI is still new to me.

I apologize in advance if this problem has already been solved and I just could not find it. I searched here and Google and looked at lots of different websites for the answer, and it seems that the only thing posted is either a tutorial that does not match what I’m seeing, or questions about running the dongle as a repeater (not what I’m trying to do) or issues with Zigbee devices connecting to the dongle (I’m not even at square one yet so too soon for me to worry about that)

I appreciate any insight in to this issue, so, thanks in advance!

P.S. I’m excited to really get in to HA and see what it can do. It already auto-discovered many of my IoT devices like media players and I’m excited about the implications of what I can do with this tool. Yay!

2

Hello NozeDive,

If you have a VM running, control has to be passed thru. I only know you need to do it, I don’t know how as I don’t use that.
Once in HA, you should refer to your device with the by-id/serial URL so that when the thing reboots it doesn’t switch ports on you. That’s for any HA instance.

3

Thanks for the information! I appreciate the guidance.

As I stated in my original post, the dongle is passed through to the VM.

As for the

by-id/serial URL

part, I’m not sure how to find those from the HA command line. Normally I would do ls /dev but that does not work in Home Assistant OS

4

Open your Home Assistant instance and show hardware information.

6

it lists events 0 through 3 and ttyS 0 through 3

event0 is the emulated ACPI Power button
event1 is an emulated mouse
event2 is an emulated mouse
event3 is an emulated keyboard power button

The ttyS entries don’t make a lot of sense to me:

ttyS0
Subsystem:tty
Device path:/dev/ttyS0
Attributes:
DEVNAME: /dev/ttyS0 DEVPATH: /devices/platform/serial8250/serial8250:0/serial8250:0.0/tty/ttyS0
MAJOR: '4'
MINOR: '64'
SUBSYSTEM: tty
TAGS: ':systemd:'
USEC_INITIALIZED: '1629929'

ttyS1
Subsystem:tty
Device path: /dev/ttyS1
Attributes:
DEVNAME: /dev/ttyS1
DEVPATH: /devices/platform/serial8250/serial8250:0/serial8250:0.1/tty/ttyS1
MAJOR: '4'
MINOR: '65'
SUBSYSTEM: tty
TAGS: ':systemd:'
USEC_INITIALIZED: '1631896'

ttyS2
Subsystem:tty
Device path: /dev/ttyS2
Attributes:
DEVNAME: /dev/ttyS2
DEVPATH: /devices/platform/serial8250/serial8250:0/serial8250:0.2/tty/ttyS2
MAJOR: '4
MINOR: '66'
SUBSYSTEM: tty
TAGS: ':systemd:'
USEC_INITIALIZED: '1632095'

ttyS3
Subsystem:tty
Device path: /dev/ttyS3
Attributes:
DEVNAME: /dev/ttyS3
DEVPATH: /devices/platform/serial8250/serial8250:0/serial8250:0.3/tty/ttyS3
MAJOR: '4'
MINOR: '67'
SUBSYSTEM: tty
TAGS: ':systemd:'
USEC_INITIALIZED: '1632162'

7

It’s showing up now.

I read on another website that the dongle has to be inserted when the machine is powered off. I didn’t think that made a lot of sense because USB devices are, by design, hot-swappable, and the other machines I plugged it in to where not powered off, but this did the trick and HA now detects the dongle.

Thanks [Sir_Goodenough] for looking in to this issue for me!! I appreciate it!!

8

It’s not them. It must not be passing thru. You need someone good with VM’s to help with this.