My second building and so zigbee network is 100m away - there is nothing in between - I have two SLZB-06 - they are both in the “Zigbee Home Automation” app but when I try and join and I am sitting in the second building the new device is not detected. So is HA only looking at the first SLZB-06 and ignoring the second one ?
Yes I’ve seen lots of post “there is never any need for two coordinators”, “dont have two networks” , “there are some “tricks” required to run multiple z2m addon instances”
So trying to decode the dismissive posts which provide no help I cant work out what is the best or even a workable way to have two seperate zigbee networks with a large geographic isolation -
I think one works out of the box - two don’t
Should I be configuring the second one as a router? They are both ethernet connected - so would that work - Or should I be removing the second one from Zigbee Home Automation (Is this what ZHA is ?) and then changing it to something eg zigbee2mqtt or Z2M
The SLZB-06 config screen has zigbee2mqtt which has a comment “if you use the Z2M addon for HA…” so is this the config for Z2M as well ? Its unclear to me
It also has a ZHA screen Also known as “Zigbee Home Assistant” but I can only use one - from the forums
If I do use zigbee2mqtt - I haven’t used MQTT for anything else - is it built in? Would I need to configure MQTT (I’ve seen people referring to mosquito is that MQTT? )
I regret using zigbee - zwave with a rasberry pi/dongle and zwaveui just worked for these two areas. I started on this because it seemed cheaper and more devices and soem very useful battery powered stick on switches - but this is too much work.
I’ve had a few problems with my zigbee network - problems such as complete loss of all communcations - I’m thinking this may be due to the two SLZB-06
I sort of feel that if it is known to not work - it’d be good to have that as an alert/problem notification like some of the other things
Finally my yellow is saying it wants to install the built in Zigbee
Since this is in effect two locations, I would set-up each SLZB-06 as it’s own coordinator running Zigbee2mqtt. You would need to install an MQTT server (either as an App in Home Assistant or somewhere else on your network). Both SLZB-06 should be configured to use this MQTT server which Home Assistant also needs to be connected to.
To try and clear things up a bit, you aren’t really connecting the SLZB-06’s to Home Assistant - you are connecting them to the MQTT server.
I think you will struggle with two ZHA coordinators.
It’s trivial to have one coordinator on ZHA and one Z2M coordinator**
Two Z2M coordinators, is also reasonably well supported (although I haven’t personally tested this config).
** - Assuming that you are able to setup Z2M (I was able to find good tutorials but others have struggled).
I am back to having both ZHA and Z2M since some devices “prefer” one of the networks (where “prefer” means they have more functionality or better refresh rates).
A zigbee network should have only 1 coordinator. I do not believe either ZHA or zigbee2mqtt support having 2 coordinators.
The ZHA integration is designed as a ‘singleton’ and hence you cannot run 2 instances. So don’t bother trying that route.
You can use ZHA for one coordinator and zigbee2mqtt as another coordinator using the Home Assistant Integrations / Apps (you will need an mqtt broker for the latter).
There are some third-party integrations that allow adding multiple zigbee2mqtt coordinators, although I personally have not tried.
Personally I use Proxmox and hence would set-up an LXC for each coordinator, doesn’t matter if I have 1 or 100. Each of these instances (LXC’s) configured to use a single MQTT server (another LXC running mosquitto). You then just configure Home Assistant to use the MQTT Integration - note: in this scenario you do not need to install the MQTT App (add-on) in Home Assistant.
I just threw a vanilla Debian install on old hardware I had lying around and span up HA as a docker container.
When I migrated ZHA->Z2M I started a second docker container.
I haven’t gotten around to auto starting the Docker containers on power failure but that should be about 1/2 hour of work.
Yeah my intent was to migrate to Z2M and for the most part it was successful but Sonoff Temperature sensors are fussy and work much better on ZHA so they got moved back.
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Frankly this is a problem with home automation in general:
Most things work but, there is always some quirk that you just can’t plan for - you have to buy the hardware then figure out workarounds…
ZHA allows you to add two zlb-06 , but does not work if they are both coordinators.
I need a coordinator for each zigbee network
I need three zigbee networks as the radio transmission ranges do not overlap , I need three but I haven’t started on the third building, FYI the buildings are about 100m apart and are corrugated iron clad buildings. I’ve tested between the closest two and there is no connectivity
I need 3 zigbee networks I have a few choices and I believe I can do the following
multiple zigbeetomqtts, 1,2 or 3, requires a mqtt
Multiple Z2M 1,2 or3 - nothing extra required
I can keep one zha , but only one
I may find my devices operate differently on Zha compared to Z2M , no mention has been made about operation on zigbeetomqtt
Given that you are looking at 3 buildings - put Debian / Docker on some old hardware and use that to host the zigbee2mqtt containers. Then just use the HA Yellow to run Home Assistant and the MQTT Broker (ie. install MQTT App and Integration on the Yellow).
This way all 3 building would be running via zigbee2mqtt so all your devices should operate in the same way.
Finally to be clear Z2M is a short form of zigbee2mqtt, so this statement is a bit confusing:
I just realized that this would actually be easier than I originally thought.
1). Add MQTT APP to Home Assistant
2). Add a HACs Zigbee2Mqtt to Home Assistant
3). Create Github Account
4). Fork HAC’s Zigbee2Mqtt repo for each controller you have
5). Add each forked Zigbee2mqtt as custom repository to HA and install
If Home Assistant notifies you zigbee2mqtt has an update, it is also a reminder to pull the latest version for each fork.
Downside of the first method is the edge addon requires manual updates.
Downside of the second method is it relies on what’s probably a parsing bug in HA that might be “fixed” in the future. In the past it has worked to add as many instances as you wish (/, //, ///, ////, etc). Now it only seems to work once without the slash and once with. Embedding an extra slash within the url works as well (https://github.com/zigbee2mqtt//hassio-zigbee2mqtt). Using a combination of slash placement you can still get more instances than you need. Bonus is you get HA managed updates. If the “bug” gets fixed, you can always fall back to the fork solution.
With multiple instances of the addon, make sure the config directory and mqtt base topic are unique to each instance.
