It is listed as having a Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 chip and in the description it says that it supports “burning NCP firmware”. I have connected the dongle to my Home Assistant and can see it in the supervisor listed as: /dev/serial/by-id/usb-1a86_USB_Serial-if00-port0 connected to ttyUSB0
I have tried adding it using the Zigbee integration, and have tried choosing the EZSP type but I’m unable to get past the next step where it asks for the port speed. I just get an error saying “Failed to connect”
So I’m a bit stuck… I’m unsure if I need to flash some firmware before this will work? Not sure where to get firmware? Or perhaps I’m using the wrong settings in HA?
Or you could always try to make sense of this feedback
If anyone will take as a coordinator keep in mind that on the stick is sewn some butlowder and laid. Jlink and simplicity commander stick do not see or sew. To break simplicity commander’s run (thanks to Vladimir Kozlov): Commander device recover – DEVICE = efr32mg21a020f768im32 Commander device masserase – DEVICE = efr32mg21a020f768im32 After that it will be possible to sew In zigbee2mqtt edge add, without this works Serial: Port: /dev/ttyusb0 Adapter: ezsp
That’s the exact same module used in the sonoff zigbee bridge. You can use any of the sonoff zigbee bridge firmwares on it. It does require the them unles you have a j-link and are able to flash that way a break bootloader.
Thanks for letting me know. Any chance you can point me towards a tutorial about how I would go about flashing this dongle? I keep going around in circles!
After further googling, I’m not making progress. The only instructions I can find for flashing this dongle seem to require me purchasing a Jlink device. But i would rather just buy a different Zigbee dongle than a Jlink.
Unless anyone has a better idea, I’m about ready to throw this dongle in the bin and start again…
I have one but it’s not in a state to confirm this, but I’d try
Ground the pa0 pin that is exposed and then reset it either by unplugging re-plugging or temporarily grounding the rst pin.
This should bring up the gecko bootloader menu in a serial console, then you’d need xmodem to send the ezsp firmware (by default these modules come with a non ezsp fw)
Hi again @tube0013
Thanks for that extra info. I was about to give up but have managed to get the dongle into bootloader mode thanks to your advice about grounding the pa0 pin. However, I don’t know how to use xmodem to send the firmware so tried using the elelabs python scripts that is linked to from the firmware page you provided. I’m not sure if I’m doing this correctly, but when I upload the firmware using the script I get an error message:
Another update, but stil no progress… Found a Russian article which Google Translate helped me with: Google Translate
In that post, they describe the exact same dongle as me and go through the steps required to update the bootloader and then to flash the firmware. Because I can see that my dongle already has the Gecko bootloader, I skipped those steps and went straight to the section where they walk through how to flash the firmware. They use the same method as I have tried, and when I used the same firmware as them, I got the same error message as before, whereas it worked fine for them. So perhaps I have a fault with my dongle or there’s something else going wrong on my side that’s causing issues.
So what the Russian site does is replace the bootloader so it can use non signed firmware. This can only be done with the debugger. So if you use the firmware they linked it won’t work with the standard bootloader as it is looking for a signed fw image. The ones from the GitHub repo I linked should work… maybe try the latest one from the bridge?
The sm-011 does not come with an ezsp compatible fw installed so I’m not sure how it interacts with the commands the utility from elelabs works as that sends some user commands for ezsp I believe.
There are some GUI based serial consoles that support xmodem I use one called “Serial” on Mac. But you may have better luck trying to find something like that for your platform.
not sure what else I’d suggest at this point. I have a j-link and access to the sdk from SI Labs so I would just move to flashing with that
Thanks for your help. I learned lots, but it looks like I need to update the bootloader as well. I tried all the firmware images from the repo you posted, and these all gave the same result. I have ordered another dongle so will wait for that one to arrive.