I am researching/preparing to migrate from Deconz/Phoscon to ZHA (as ZHA is integrated in Home-assistant and seems more future proof)
I am running Home Assistant OS (core-2022.7.7) with ConBee-2 stick on: generic-x86-64
Is there a preferred migration path to ZHA from Deconz/Phoscon without re-installing Home Assistant?
Can I, for instance, disable the intergration and the Addon, reboot, remove addon and integration and add ZHA ?
I know i probably have to repair the devices i have running that is no problem.
I am curious if you have already migrated and if so how it went.
I myself have Homeassitant as a virtual machine on a windows 10 NUC with deconz via windows and may want to switch to a generic-x86-64 version of HA but then have to convert deconz to ZHA
Nope, didn’t migrate yet. I am still waiting for someone who has experience… or a migration method from within ZHA installation…which would be awesome.
That would be the process if you want to use your existing stick.
There’s no magic to it. There is no need to re-install HA, but you’re essentially starting zigbee over with ZHA, re-building everything from the ground up.
Do not expect all automations to remain functional just because you try to keep the same entity/device names. Things will break. Some things are just handled differently. What might be exposed as an entity in Deconz may need to be handled as a ZHA event, etc.
BUT…
Do yourself a favor and buy a second stick. A single instance of HA will support running both ZHA and Deconz concurrently.
Having both active allows you to learn, experiment and migrate devices at your leisure.
Otherwise, everything breaks when you disable Deconz, and it’s a mad rush to get devices paired up in ZHA and all your automations updated.
The second stick can be, but does not need to be another Conbee stick. Theoretically, as the chip in the Yellow and the future HA branded usb dongle, an SI Labs EFR32MG21 based stick should get the most native love and support from the ZHA/HA devs.
I was searching for the answer to the same question. What I did was to stop deconz, start up the ZHA integration and start working. It took ZHA an hour to get through my 100+ devices. At first, it didn’t find any battery devices, but waking them manually did the trick.
The neat thing is that all lights and devices found by ZHA magically appear under the same device tab as deconz entities, which makes it easy to rename them to your old entity. Doing so, no need to mod any automations given you are copying the same entity id from the old device.
To not break anything, I renamed my deconz-entities with a _old suffix, if I need to switch back.
So, 1) stop deconz (I ran deconz inside my HA install so I only stopped the add-on, not the integration) 2. Fire up ZHA and let it discover all devices automatically 3) rename all devices. Now you’re running ZHA.
Good luck!
Edit: Oh, and make a backup for your deconz-config in Phoscon. Menu > Gateway > Backup Options. Just in case!
Thanks for these instructions, I may try this as I constantly lose connection to battery devices and have to re-add them in Deconz/Phoscon. Does standalone ZHA improve the reliability for this?
Using Conbee 2 stick and have about 15 total devices.
