Homematic hmip rf-usb under Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,

I am about to switch my home assistant installation from an ESXI VM to a dedicated hardware box.
My current installation in a VM has a Conbee 2 stick and a Homematic HMIP RF-USB stick connected successfully.

This new box is a Gigabyte J4105N-H Mainboard with Intel Celeron J4105 Quad-Core CPU and 8 GB of ram. I first tried to install the HassOS NUC image by dd the image to the internal SSD using a live CD. But unfortunately it threw a lot of errors when booting and never loaded the WebUI.

So I switched to Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10 64bit which installed just fine and also detected the Zigbee Conbee 2 stick. But the Homematic stick is not being detected by Home Assistant. Means it doesn’t show up under Hardware nor does the Homematic Add-on start because of this.

In Debian the Homematic stick seems to be detected without errors:

ha@user01:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c30e Logitech, Inc. UltraX Keyboard (Y-BL49)
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1b1f:c020 eQ-3 Entwicklung GmbH
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1cf1:0030 Dresden Elektronik
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub



ha@user1:~$ dmesg | grep usb
[    2.481468] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[    2.481477] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[    2.481513] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[    2.500921] usb usb1: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002, bcdDevice= 4.19
[    2.500922] usb usb1: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
[    2.500924] usb usb1: Product: xHCI Host Controller
[    2.500925] usb usb1: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.0-10-amd64 xhci-hcd
[    2.500926] usb usb1: SerialNumber: 0000:00:15.0
[    2.502460] usb usb2: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0003, bcdDevice= 4.19
[    2.502461] usb usb2: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
[    2.502462] usb usb2: Product: xHCI Host Controller
[    2.502463] usb usb2: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.0-10-amd64 xhci-hcd
[    2.502464] usb usb2: SerialNumber: 0000:00:15.0
[    2.838492] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[    2.988380] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=1cf1, idProduct=0030, bcdDevice= 1.00
[    2.988387] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[    2.988390] usb 1-5: Product: ConBee II
[    2.988394] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: dresden elektronik ingenieurtechnik GmbH
[    2.988397] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: DE2190225
[    3.118254] usb 1-6: new full-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[    3.267849] usb 1-6: New USB device found, idVendor=1b1f, idProduct=c020, bcdDevice= 1.00
[    3.267852] usb 1-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[    3.267853] usb 1-6: Product: eQ-3 HmIP-RFUSB
[    3.267854] usb 1-6: Manufacturer: Silicon Labs
[    3.267856] usb 1-6: SerialNumber: 3014F711A061A7C00010CECF
[    3.394352] usb 1-8: new low-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[    3.571903] usb 1-8: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=c30e, bcdDevice= 1.80
[    3.571905] usb 1-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[    3.571906] usb 1-8: Product: HID compliant keyboard
[    3.571907] usb 1-8: Manufacturer: Logitech
[    3.909965] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
[    4.044447] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[    4.044449] usbhid: USB HID core driver
[    4.123079] input: Logitech HID compliant keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.0/usb1/1-8/1-8:1.0/0003:046D:C30E.0001/input/input2
[    4.182429] hid-generic 0003:046D:C30E.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Logitech HID compliant keyboard] on usb-0000:00:15.0-8/input0
[    4.182618] input: Logitech HID compliant keyboard Consumer Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.0/usb1/1-8/1-8:1.1/0003:046D:C30E.0002/input/input4
[    4.242446] input: Logitech HID compliant keyboard System Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.0/usb1/1-8/1-8:1.1/0003:046D:C30E.0002/input/input5
[    4.242824] hid-generic 0003:046D:C30E.0002: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Device [Logitech HID compliant keyboard] on usb-0000:00:15.0-8/input1

But there is no “by-id” being generated:

ha@user1:~$ ls /dev/serial/by-id/ -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 Aug 31 13:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 80 Aug 31 13:20 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Aug 31 13:20 usb-dresden_elektronik_ingenieurtechnik_GmbH_ConBee_II_DE2190225-if00 -> ../../ttyACM0

The only error message in Home Assistant is:

Failed to initialize proxy for homeassistant-hmip

But I guess that’s just the result of the homematic stick not being available in HA.

Has anyone an idea what the issue could be or point me into the right direction for further troubleshooting?

thx and Best
Pete

2

Alright,

since I did a lot of trial and error, I’m gonna post my experiences with this topic here, so other people with similar issues save some trouble and time.

It seems that a kernel module for the HmIP stick is needed on the debian host. Otherwise it just doesn’t work, even if the stick itself is being detected by the host OS.
I followed the installation process of debmatic written down here:
https://github.com/alexreinert/debmatic/blob/7d735721f718431d3e1d112e16751c7c1de2a25f/docs/setup/otheros.md

The command

sudo apt install pivccu-modules-dkms

installs the kernel module. After a restart and before the actual installation of debmatic
the HmIP stick already appears in Home Assistant under supervisor->system->hardware.
However using the official Home Assistant Homematic add-on with this particular hardware still doesn’t work for whatever reason.

After installing debmatic via

sudo apt install debmatic

debmatic is running as a service on the debian host and can be configured as CCU in HA configuration.yaml.

So far this setup works quite well and has some advantages over using the Homematic add-on.

  • debmatic is ccu3, the add-on is ccu2
  • Homematic WebUI feels snappier
  • Firmware updates are being pushed to the devices which didn’t work for me with the add-on.
  • Even if pushing firmware updates would work, the process of pushing firmware takes up to 48 hours and restarts each time, HA (and the add-on) is being restarted. Debmatic is independent from HA restarts and only resets the upgrade procedure in case the host is being restarted.

Hope that helps one or other who runs into similar issues.

Best
Pete

3

My solution to use the addon: module for HMIP-RFUSB must be loaded every time after reboot. For that init.d can be used:

  1. add the following line to /etc/modules file:
cp210x
  1. add the following line at the end of file /etc/rc.local (but before last line with “exit 0”)
 sh -c 'echo 1b1f c020 > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/cp210x/new_id'
  1. reboot your RPi
  2. now the addon can be configured and started.
1 Like
4

This solution provided by Wladi works under Debian 11, Armbian 22.08 or Ubuntu 22.04 also.
Thx