Migration from Conbee II to ConBee III

Configuration Zigbee
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1

I have recently bought the new ConBee III stick and thought it was a piece of cake to migrate my existing lamps, sensors and switches from my ConBee II stick. I have failed so far as most of the sensors and switches were not recognized anymore. So I switched back to ConBee II. In the meantime, thanks to the Phoscon support I found out why this cannot work at the time being. Now I start this topic so that hopefully others will not run into the same issue.

Prerequisite

According to Phoscon support, the release of deCONZ addon 2.24.x is a prerequisite for the ConBee III stick to work with Home Assistant (current version is 2.22.2). It is assumed that the community will release the appropriate update within the next days.

Migration ConBee / ConBee II to ConBee III

Once the deCONZ update is available, just backup the gateway setup from within the Phoscon app and restore it after the stick has been changed. For more details, please see

https://phoscon.de/en/conbee3/upgrade

I hope someone finds this information helpful.

7 Likes
2

Thanks for this update. I will wait to update now :slight_smile:

3

Thanks Mike, looking forward to migrate.

4

Thanks a lot! I found out the hard way :sweat_smile:

Hope they come with the update soon!

1 Like
5

FYI, ConBee 3 should also work in Home Assistant’s built-in ZHA integration from 2023.12 release:

If instead using ConBee with Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) then check out these discussions about external migration using zigpy-cli as an external unofficial stand-alone tool for Zigbee network backup and restore (while Z2M is stopped):

6

Is there any way I can force deCONZ to update from 2.22 to 2.24? I have Home Assistant 2023.12.0 and my deCONZ is still 2.22. I just today received a brand new Conbee III, but migration is not possible because of the deCONZ version, at least I have interpreted so from this thread.

7

Definitely no, as there is no version 2.24 yet. Please see the current change log in my first post. So we all have to further wait until it is available.

8

Thanks! I thought next few days have already gone.

9

You are right. But that’s what I was told. I also assumed they mean days and not weeks. :wink:

1 Like
10

I updated to 2023.12.1. After update, Phoscon is still 2.22.02, which means no luck for migration, I guess. Maybe I should migrate to ZHA, which I was trying to avoid with Conbee III. I am not very tempted, because I have so many Zigbee devices and I assume that I should build everything from the scratch.

11

Quick question. I have a brand new Home Assistant Yellow. I’m not planning to migrate anything to it, I’ll set up each device and pair as if they are new.

I also have a new Conbee III USB stick and I’d like to use it. HA Yellow has Zigbee support on the board, so I’m assuming that I will have to disable the built-in Zigbee and instruct it to use the Conbee III. Anyone have an idea of how I might do that? Thanks in advance.

EDIT - answering my own question.

  • Click Settings → Devices & Services → Zigbee Home Automation
  • You should see an existing entry for “Yellow”, click the hamburger menu and delete it.
  • Click Add Entry and select the Conbee III and proceed with the configuraiton
12

FYI, should now be easy to migrate to a new adapter (via process of backup and restore) using this new TubesZB Zigpy-CLI Tools add-on can migrate even if using Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant:

13

Hello.
I bought a conbee 3 and i will migrate from conbee2 to conbee 3 (with zigbee2mqtt) in the next days.

My idea is:

  • stop zigbee2mqtt
  • making a backup with “zb-zigpy-cli-tools”.
  • change the baud rate of conbee in zigbee2mqtt config file
  • restore the backup with “zb-zigpy-cli-tools”
  • launch zigbee2mqtt

its seems simple, but i dont know if someone make this before and will work, because in the backup of zb-zigpy-cli-tools i can see information about the zigbee that maybe i will change?
like “node version” or “deconz version”

14

thanks for the help

ive had a ConBee 2 for 3+ years now.
you seening much benefit in doing the upgrade?

just cusious if worth spending the ÂŁ and effort to do it?

15

in my case yes. i see the map in zigbee2mqtt and see 24 devices connected directly to the conbee (other 80 by routers). and the conbee 2 have a limit in the direct connections.
with conbee3 i will can increase this limit. But is my case, each person have a user case.

but now the conbee3 firmware is buggy and not have all the improvements of the conbee2 for devices.
we need to wait some firmware version to make the migration

16

Yes, it should work, and others have reported that backup and restore to ConBee 3 works with zigpy-cli, see:

https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions/19785

and

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-cli/discussions/41

Note that Zigbee2MQTT does still not feature native backup support for ConBee adapter, again see → https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee-herdsman/issues/665

So if using Zigbee2MQTT then it is recommended to use Texas Instruments CC2652 based adapter instead, which you can migrate to using zigpy-cli → https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions/16478

17

Curiously, has anyone reported this to Github Issues so they know the update is needed?

EDIT: I hope I didn’t overstep, but I went ahead and opened an issue to alert the dev to the need. deCONZ outdated - users cannot migrate to latest dongle · Issue #109206 · home-assistant/core · GitHub

18

Today seems to be the day - see changelog:

6.23.0

Bump deCONZ to 2.25.3

1 Like
19

The long awaited update finally happened. I immediately updated, backed up, shut down, pulled the Conbee II stick, plugged in the new Conbee III, loaded backup and everything was right where it was. Now I’m enjoying the much more flawless add-on features.
Thank you to all that made this update possible!

2 Likes
20

Hello Norbert,

can you write down the steps how to do it?
Thank you
Gabriel