Problem adding Philips Bulbs to Z2M

Today I decided to finally move all my IKEA and Philips Bulbs from their native bridges over to S2M (Using multi protocol Sonoff 3.0 Stick)

IKEA devices went fine. Unfortunately there is a problem with my Philips bulbs. Every bulb I add works for around a minute and is then stuck to whatever status they are on. After a few more minutes they go offline. When I restart Z2M they come back online but ar still unresponsive. I get an error message as in the screenshot below.

I also added my network here

Is there some kind of problem with Philips? Or is there a limitation of number of devices? Or does anybody have another idea?

Have you turned off the hue bridge? Should not be an issue with Philips bulbs, I have several in a larger network than this and they have been online for years.

thx for the advice. While it has improved the situation a little (3 Philips devices have come online and stayed now for at least 20 minutes, 2 others showed same behavior as before. Of course all are removed from Hue Bridge and Hue bridge is disconnected and turned off

Edit: I am really not far from switching to ZHA

From my experience and reading, I would suspect the multi-protocol firmware in your Silicon Labs based coordinator first. Ideally, I would replace the Silicon Labs based coordinator with a TI 26xx based chip coordinator. If not that, then just get rid of the whole ‘multi-protocol’ firmware in the Silicon Labs device, I’m not sure you can ‘dumb it down’. I think you will really make your life worse by moving from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA. I would do some deeper reading of the posts here on this forum about folks with issues with the Silicon Labs firmware and with issues with ZHA. I have moved completely from Hue Hub and ZHA to Zigbee2MQTT (based on TI 26xx coordinators) and my Hue devices are very performant.

Good hunting!

am I right that Sky Connect Stick also uses multi-protocol?

From my understand, yes the Sky Connect is also multi-protocol based. I have to say, I have not diddled around with the Silicon Labs based stuff for quite a while, and I have a Sky Connect dongle on my shelf of things to play with but have yet to do. So, do not have any first hand knowledge on these devices with Zigbee2MQTT, so take my advice with a grain of sand :wink: If you do do some searching here on this forum, I think you will find a greater number of folks having problems in two areas, first with these ‘multi-protocol’ devices in general with both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT and second folks have issues using the Silicon Labs device as a coordinator with Zigbee2MQTT.

My fundamental points are :

  1. Zigbee2MQTT uses the TI25xx and TI26xx based devices for it’s coordinator in the vast majority of installs. And the Silicon Lab’s chip based devices are from my understanding still listed as ‘experimental’ for use as a Zigbee2MQTT coordinator device.

  2. You just want your coordinator device to work. So if you are going with Zigbee2MQTT, use it’s best option for this function.

  3. My experience with Zigbee2MQTT in general is a solid one. I would like to see ZHA succeed, but there is so much more developement and support going on in Zigbee2MQTT compared to ZHA.

  4. Specific to my setups with Zigbee2MQTT, I have a number of Hue devices and use the TI26xx devices as my coordinators. I can not remember a time of one of my Hue devices not working in this setup.

thx for the big reply. I will take a look at it. Seems my problem is more with the devices. I tried to reverse the Philips devices back to Hue bridge but some won’t pair with Hue bridge anymore. Now I run with a mixture of Hue Bridge and Z2M and one device that won’t pair at all. Totally confused.

Make sure you are doing a complete device removal. This can be difficult. The device you are removing from a zigbee network needs to be on and awake during the removal. Just removing it from a coordinator without the device acknowledging the removal leaves the device in a unknown state.

Regardless of whether I feel I get a full removal of a device, I try to do a multiple hard reset of the device before I try and add it back to a new zigbee network of any kind.

Doing the ‘touchlink’ addition of the device back to Hue hub is an other method to add. and if you have good eyes write down the serial number on the base of bulb and try to add via serial number.

And back to the Silicon Labs devices for use as coordinators for Zigbee2MQTT:

"The adapters below are experimental, don’t use these if you want a stable setup.

Based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG2x/MGM21x and EFR32MG1x/MGM1x series"

Good hunting!

am I right that Sky Connect Stick also uses multi-protocol?

Only when used with SiLabs Multiprotocol AddOn. However the SiLabs Multiprotocol in its current state, tends to crash every so often and the developers are not recommending it for production use (but fine to play with, which is what I have been doing).