Were you on deconz before? If so, I setup the sky/z2m and repaired just 1 device to get used to it and verify stability for a few hours. Then I couldnt stop myself and moved everything over manually 1 at a time, very easy to adjust the entity/friendly names and fixed my automations 1 at a time.
I only have 18 devices, but it was all pretty straightforward because the z2m frontend is super nice compared to deconz.
I have a few devices that never seemed to even pair/work with the conbeeII on deconz that paired and work perfectly with z2m so thats cool.
Then I did all of the OTA updates I had available for my innr plugs and a few other things and things have been solid!
The only “funkiness” I have seen so far was some clunkiness in getting pairing to occur on 1 or 2 devices, a device I kept kicking off the network would keep rejoining even though permit join was disabled, and an outlet kept falling off the network intermittently until I re-paired it. But all of that is now “resolved” so things seem good and stable, will keep an eye on all of it in the coming days. Also takes a tiny bit to get used to the MQTT retention and stuff for all of this, but I appreciate having the insight into it vs deconz, and really like using https://mqtt-explorer.com/
I have no matter/thread stuff yet, so will wait until I do before reassessing
I prefer to have my mesh network separate from my HA instance. If they allowed a ZHA standalone container I would probably have gone that route, but for now z2m is great
I’ve migrated from a conbee II (ZHA) to the skyconnect and somewhere along the way there’s an issue. Every time I restart core I lose the ability to use two Aqara opple 6 button switches as it seems it no longer knows which zha quirk to use… I have to delete and re-add them so that they pick up the appropriate quirk again…
Is this some unusual software / hardware interaction to cause this change?
Occasionally I’ll have devices just ‘leave the network’ and never come back. I suspect it’s a firmware issue with the device - even though it’s mentioned in the blog related to the multi-pan function, it’s basically what I’m seeing
"The bug is that Zigbee end-devices cannot rejoin the network through the coordinator: it kicks them and asks them to re-join, over and over. "
I’m not using the multi-pan firmware though. There seems to be a bug with Aqara stuff that is being fixed at the moment.
The sky connect was a good way to show support for the HA project so I actually bought 2 with the intent to run one as pure ZigBee and the other as pure Thread. If that’s not possible I’ll just gift the second one to a friend who’s starting to scratch the HA surface.
I recently purchased the new SkyConnect coordinator, partly as a way of supporting Nabu Casa, and partly to get onto what I believed would be the best supported Zigbee coordinator for H.A.
After receiving it I learned that it uses a chipset that still only has experimental support in Z2M. So I converted my H.A. setup to use ZHA. That generally works great – and actually seems more stable and responsive then Z2M – but I’m no longer able to use my six green-power based control buttons (all based on EnOcean PTM 215Z) , as zigbee green power isn’t supported by ZHA (due to lack of support in zigpy, I believe)
If SkyConnect and ZHA are meant to power the premier H.A. experience, then this issue with no green power support really needs to get resolved.
For reference, this pull request for ZHA documentation would at least add a mention of these limitations as well as some other essential information I think is needed in an introduction to new users for the ZHA integration:
ZHA integration follows the official Zigbee specification standards and uses one Zigbee Coordinator to set up and control a Zigbee network. Once ZHA has been installed and the Zigbee Coordinator is configured you will be able to directly join/pair Zigbee Router Device and Zigbee End Device products to that Zigbee network, regardless of the manufacturer and brand of that Zigbee-based product. Please see the respective sections below for compatible Zigbee radio modules hardware (physical radio adapter) and information on supported Zigbee devices.
Before installing the integration you will need to buy and connect a Zigbee Coordinator adapter to the computer running the Home Assistant installation. The general recommendation is to buy a newer model of Zigbee Coordinator adapter hardware and to flash the latest firmware to it, the reason that is it will usually offer better interoperability with all functions of most Zigbee 3.0 compliant devices on the market.
Supported devices are Zigbee Router Devices, which are normally mains-powered that act as Zigbee signal repeaters within the Zigbee network mesh to extend its range and improve coverage, and Zigbee End Devices, which will not act as Zigbee signal repeaters and are usually but not always battery-operated sensors.
Limitations
Note that ZHA only supports connecting one dedicated Zigbee Coordinator adapter with a single Zigbee network and that the Zigbee Coordinator adapter cannot already be connected or used by any other application. Any devices that are or have previously been connected to another Zigbee implementation will also need to first be reset to their factory default settings before they can be paired/joined to ZHA, please see each device manufacturer’s documentation.
ZHA does not yet support devices that can only use the ZGP (“Zigbee Green Power”) profile which is used in a few batteryless self-powered or energy harvesting devices, (such as for example; Philips Hue Click, Philips Hue Tap, and some “Friends of Hue” partnership switches). The reason for this is that ZGP profile support has not yet been implemented in the zigpy library.
ZHA does not support devices that can only use the ZSE (“Zigbee Smart Energy”) profile because “Zigbee SE” is not part of the Zigbee 3.0 specification standard and thus not implemented in the Zigbee stack of commonly available Zigbee Coordinator adapters.
I want to use my RPi (Hassio) as a Thread border router and my Skyconnect with only Thread enabled firmware not multiprotocol. (use Sonoff dongle with z2m now)
Is this possible yet?
In order to use Multi-pan with the SkyConnect you need to install the “Silicon Labs Multiprotocol” add-on which then depends on using the Silicon Labs cpc-daemon?
I understand the SkyConnect configuration / integration is temporarily disabled.
Is there any ETA on when the SkyConnect integration will be ready for deployment?
I was coming to conclusion that this is a problem of my own making and I should just get an ethernet co-ordinator like Tubez instead - but…
Z2MQTT then - am i understanding this correctly:
I install the ‘windows’ version on the actual machine, plug the skyconnect in
configure it and it spits out MQTT onto my network
Add the integration into HA in hyper V and it then interfaces with the devices via Network- MQTT-W11 ‘real machine’-MQTT component on W11-skyconnect and then to device?
If so that looks like the workaround? Although the future Matter function is lost…
I really should just return the skyconnect and get a Tubez or similar shouldn’t I?!
To summarize what I mentioned above, personally, I like recommend these type of setups in general:
If want to use Home Assistant’s ZHA integration then it is today highly recommended to use a Zigbee Coordinator USB adapter based Silicon Labs EFR32MG21/EFR32MG13, Texas Instruments CC2652/CC1352, or ConBee II (dresden-elektronik), in that specific order if stability is your highest requirement. ZHA also support other Zigbee Coordinator adapters but they are either older or not supported as well. See https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#recommended-zigbee-radio-adapters-and-modules
If want to use Zigbee2MQTT instead then it is today highly recommended to use a Zigbee Coordinator USB adapter based on Texas Instruments CC2652P/CC1352P or ConBee 2 if stability is your highest requirement. Zigbee2MQTT also support other Zigbee Coordinator adapters but they are either older or not supported as well (e.g. “experimental”). See https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/#recommended
I personally recommend using a single dedicated radio USB adapter for each separate wireless protocol as it both decreases complexity and at least on paper should offer better performance.
So a tip is to use a single dedicated Home Assistant SkyConnect USB dongle for Thread (and Matter over Thread) and then buy another separate single dedicated Home Assistant SkyConnect USB dongle (or other Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 based USB adapter) with ZHA or alternatively a separate single dedicated Texas Instruments CC2652P USB adapter instead if using Zigbee2MQTT.
If not absolutely necessary try to avoid internally connected Zigbee Coordinator adapters that are mounted inside the computer case since that will increase interference and decrease reception.
Better would be to buy and use a single-board computer (SBC) with Linux OS to run Zigbee2MQTT, such as example an Raspberry Pi or Hardkernel ODROID and use that as a dedicated appliance for just for that purpose. You should then also be able to squeeze in for example ZWaveJSMQTT (ZWave JS MQTT) on the same computer with a Z-Wave 700 USB dongle like the Aeotec Z-Stick 7.
Thanks Hedda - a lot of those are what i would like to do but (for my current arrangement) can’t because hyperv wont take a USB pass through. In theory i can’t plug any USB’s into my machine.
I think the Z2MQTT solution is an option though if it comes to it - thanks for the input, i am looking at a few options and that is defintitely one i hadn’t though of.
Since discussing different Zigbee2MQTT setups any further and deeper here would be way too much off-topic for this thread I recommend that you ask for advice in Zigbee2MQTT support channnels (https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions, though a quick suggestion would again be for you to consider looking more into if a better setup option for Zigbee2MQTT might be to instead buy and use a single-board computer (SBC) with Linux OS to run Zigbee2MQTT (such as example a Raspberry Pi or Hardkernel ODROID) and use that as a dedicated appliance for Zigbee2MQTT (and maybe also other smaller IoT applications such as the Mosquitto MQTT Broker). Anyway, Zigbee2MQTT has a very small footprint so it would really be overkill to run it on a PC with Windows OS. And if you want to run several different application that all have small footprints on the same single-board computer with Linux, then suggest run either the Zigbee2MQTT image in a Docker container with Docker Compose or in a virtual machine on Pimox/Proxmox (Pimox V7) virtualization hypervisor (virtual machine manager) or even a combination of the two (with the Zigbee2MQTT image for Docker on Linux running inside a virtual machine under Pimox/Proxmox):
, as zigbee green power