I have the Sonoff zigbee 3 USB dongle that I suspect may be failing. I would like to replace it with the identical model. What is involved with this? I am using ZHA. I’m running 2024.2 on a RPi
I see links in ZHA about “migrate radio” but am looking for some documentation on what the steps will be - or descriptions from others that have done this.
My situation is that I am remote from the Pi, so would ask a friend to flash the dongle, swap out the old and plug in the new one - provided that 's all he will have to do. Will it be straightforward or will things like rebuilding / re-pairing every device be necessary (requiring physical access to every zigbee device)?
I had a zigbee network that has been very stable for several months. It has 8 Third Reality gen 2 smart power monitoring plugs, 4 Sengled power monitoring plugs, 4 various motion sensors and 2 smoke detectors. The house sat empty for several months (i.e. no changes, nothing new added), just HA merrily watching and controlling the house in my absence. (There is also a lot of UPB, Zwave, Yolink devices that continue to run perfectly) Then, in around December the 8 Third Reality plugs all went off line. Then a few days later they came back online, then on and off every few weeks ever since. It realize now, that even when they were on-line - they really were only partially on-line - they could report power levels, but I could not control them (Failed to Send request - Duplicate TSN). Today I noticed this same behaviour with the Sengled devices - they all report power but I cannot control any of them. Looking back, I see now that I haven’t been able to control the sengled for quite some time. The motion sensors work fine. As far as I know the smoke detectors work fine (I haven’t had a fire but they do report status regularly) Sometimes the TR plugs stop transmitting power data for a week or so as well - but the Sengled keep sending power data - the Sengled has never stopped sending power data.
After months of providing information and answering questions from the ZHA team, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the ZHA integration is not at fault here. Yesterday I had a friend go over and we removed one Third Reality plug, did a factory reset and re paired it to the network. No change. I still cannot control it. Pairing took a very long time. We did the testing with the plug 4m from the coordinator (direct line of site). Power cycling the Pi and coordinator has not helped.
So, in a house that sat idle for over 4 months, suddenly 12 zigbee devices stopped accepted commands (which is 100% of the zigbee devices that should be controllable stopped being controllable). All motion devices work fine, power level gets received some of the time. Unless I believe that 12 different devices all went bad at the same time, I’m struggling to find another likely cause. I’ve considered noise in the network - but trouble shooting that (remotely) seems a lot harder than just having a friend (who is an electrical engineer who manages the firmware development team for the Garmin Communications division and also uses HA) - swapping out a dongle as a first test.
I am very open to other options - and while, I have asked this question a few times in various forums in this community, no one to date has any ideas. I’d love to hear your thoughts and be thrilled to learn if there is something else I can try!
I’m sorry - this must be very frustrating, trying to fix Zigbee from a distance. It’s bad enough when you’re on the spot.
I expect you’e done this already, but have you looked at the ZHA energy scan? You should be able to get that remotely - it’s at the bottom of the diagnostics you can download from the ZHA integration page. Mine looks like this:
You can see the amount of noise on each channel, (which includes Zigbee, wi-fi, your neighbour’s wi-fi etc.). Something may have changed in the last four months.
My only other thought is that 4m is quite a long way…
So this raises another interesting point. I brought this up with the ZHA team but they had no explanation.
When I try to download the diagnostics I get an error:
When I click on the file I get
At the same time I also get a error in HA that an attempt to log in failed. That issue only happens when the devices are offline (at the very beginning this problem was more intermittent and I could download the diagnostics when everything was running fine (of course!) - but not when it was failing.
I experienced this when I tried flashing my sonoff zigbee dongle with new firmware; unable to control them but they reported their state promptly when toggling state using the buttons on the plugs. Have you changed the firmware from the original? I fixed it by reverting to the original version and it came back to life.
I have not changed it. So it is the same version that they worked with for several months. ZHA is supposed to offer ota firmware updating capability but zha can neither find the devices firmware levels, nor the current level offered by the manufacturer.
The motion sensors work fine. As far as I know the smoke detectors work fine (I haven’t had a fire but they do report status regularly)
There are also two battery devices - a moisture sensor for my lawn and a 4 button hand held switch. These aren’t in use over the winter so they continued to send signals or be (presumably) functional until their batteries died last fall. Any device that just sends me signals/status continues to work fine
As I understand the Zigbee protocol, devices dynamically switch between channels during communication to find the clearest channel. You are just selecting the starting channel.
Mine reliably reports when my wife is frying dinner. But never when the chimney flue is closed.
I apologize for asking you to repeat the data in post #4. I do agree with @Stiltjack in that if some devices are working through the dongle, then the dongle is unlikely to be the problem.
It just occurred to me, do you have OTA firmware updates turned on in your configuration.yaml?
Not sure about this. Devices in a Zigbee network change their connections with one another dynamically, but the channel is selected in the integration. I don’t think ZHA changes channel automatically (like some wi-fi routers, say).
and be thrilled to learn if there is something else I can try!
