New House Built Around Zigbee... ZHA Errors SLZB-06

Configuration Zigbee
1

Hi Community,

So… I’ve built a new house (UK). The electrics have all been wired based on using home assistant and zigbee. There are no light switches. Relevance of that is that I need the basic setup to be reliable and low (no) maintenance.

Early days but so far it is neither. The system is vital and not sure what the backup plan is!! From the trawling I have done on the community there are some smart people here so hoping there is an easy fix.

There is a whole house WIFI and Ethernet network. There is a server room. In that room there is a HA Green Box. Working nicely as far as I can see. Completely up to date.

Originally I had the Sky Connect dongle in the server room, but in hindsight that was never really going to be reliable as was in a remote-ish locked room in corner of house.

After some trawling, I purchased the SMLIGHT SLZB-06P7. Full system reset and that is now connected over POE right in the middle of the house. HA found the dongle. All devices re-paired nicely. Using ZHA.

Now, almost every day (3 weeks in) at some seemingly random point during the day or night everything connected to that SLZB becomes unavailable on the dashboard and cannot be controlled. The ZHA card says ‘setup failed’. The only way of getting things back is to reset the SLZB either via it’s web interface or through the card in HA. Resetting ZHA does not work, the first time it happened I reset the Hub and that didn’t clear the error either.

The SLZB is up to date, originally I thought the blackout coincided with the dongle auto-updating; but it does not. I reached out to SMLIGHT a couple of weeks ago but no response.

From checking the logs after these blackouts it seems to be a similar recurring issue (below). There are some older threads with similar, but just seemed to be an HA update resolved it in those cases.

Logger: zigpy.application
Source: /usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy/application.py:668
First occurred: 31 October 2024 at 07:14:52 (2 occurrences)
Last logged: 1 November 2024 at 13:37:38

Watchdog failure
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy_znp/api.py", line 1065, in request
    response = await response_future
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
asyncio.exceptions.CancelledError

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy/application.py", line 666, in _watchdog_loop
    await self.watchdog_feed()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy/application.py", line 652, in watchdog_feed
    await self._watchdog_feed()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy_znp/zigbee/application.py", line 628, in _watchdog_feed
    await self._znp.request(c.SYS.Ping.Req())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zigpy_znp/api.py", line 1061, in request
    async with async_timeout.timeout(
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/async_timeout/__init__.py", line 141, in __aexit__
    self._do_exit(exc_type)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/async_timeout/__init__.py", line 228, in _do_exit
    raise asyncio.TimeoutError
TimeoutError"

Any ideas anybody? Really hoping the Community can assist. Any further info required, please let me know!!

Thanks in advance and apologies for the long message.

2

Sounds like an interference problem. There are many writeups and videos on how to build a solid zigbee network, e.g. wifi / zigbee channel selection, supplemental routers, etc.

If the entire network is dropping, I’d guess a bad coordinator and try swapping that out.

Less likely, but worth checking since it appears “random” - check your major appliances to see if any are running and causing the drop. Microwaves are notorious for emitting RFI in the same frequency band used by 2.4 Ghz wifi and Zigbee.

3

solstyce9, thanks for your quick response and understood. Naively I thought Zigbee ZHA et al. would be sufficiently ‘robust’ so that stability/temporary interference issues wouldn’t bring the system down. Or as you say I may just be unlucky with a faulty coordinator.

I am also a novice.

I have just written an automation to press the ‘reset’ on the coordinator when one of the lights becomes Unavailable or Unknown for more than 2mins. There is a counter so that I can monitor how often that triggers. Not elegant but I’ll have to see if that works… Seems like I could replace coordinator, re-channel the whole system or whatever and still end up with similar blackouts because of some other quirk.

Thanks again for response.

4

Hello.
I recently got into Zigbee and bought a SLZB-06, a few bulbs and a motion sensor.
I’ve only been using them for a couple of weeks but have had to restart the SLZB-06 at least a few times.
I just started looking into the issue and any potential fixes and came across your post.

Figured I could list my config here in case you or anyone else can see anything related that may be causing our issue:

SLZB-06:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804944165230.html

|Radiomodule mode:|Zigbee coordinator|
|Connection mode:|Ethernet mode|
|Ethernet connected:|Yes|
|WiFi client turned On:|No|
|WiFi AP turned On:|No|
Firmware version: 20240710 v2.5.6

  • Core2024.10.4
  • Supervisor2024.10.3
  • Operating System13.2
  • Frontend20241002.4

I’m glad to provide any other info if needed.

EDIT:
I implemented the restart and counter automation that you mentioned.
Additionally there was a firmware update for the SLZB-06 within the last week.

Anyway the counter is showing there were no restarts in the last 5 days and everything has been working flawlessly.
Not sure if the firmware has fixed something or not.