Restarting DeConz - motion sensors are always detected

I’m using a bunch of Aqara (Xiaomi) sensors, both motion and contact sensors. The problems I’ve been having lately is that whenever I restart DeConz, the motion sensor will always start up as detected or triggered, while the contact sensors behave properly as they should. Since the motion sensor will only revert to un-detected only if it gets triggered, and after a timeout, this means that it will get stuck in a false state until someone actually walks near to reset it. And this poses an issue if I’m away from my home, unable to “reset” the sensor. My question is if anyone has seen this issue, and if there’s a way to set the state of the sensor from the DeConz user interface?
Note that I can change the state of the sensor in Home Assistant, but this does not affect the outcome, as eventually, DeConz will think that the sensor is still triggered and send that falsing state to HA. Hope there is a workaround for this. Thanks.

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yes same here

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You are not alone. I have seen this too. And it is not all sensors. It is random. It can be 1 of 10 or 5 of 10. And only motion sensors.

I also often see that the state in Phoscon app and the HA integration via API do not match.

I use the 2.19.3 version of Deconz running on separate Debian machine so this is not a HA addon thing.

Thanks for responding. If you don’t think it’s the HA addon, then it has to be either the motion sensors themselves or ConbeeII. I wonder if the battery level reported by the sensor is accurate. I see them being near 100%, but I’ll try changing the batteries to a couple of them anyway to see if that makes any difference; at least that will eliminate one potential issue. Strange thing is it used to work just fine until recently, and I have not touched the ConbeeII firmware in a long time, only updated the DeConz addon versions as they become available. I wish there’s an option to set the state of the sensors, as I know when I’m rebooting, so I can just initialize them all to CLEAR as an automation step; that would be a good work-around.

Same problem for me. I already renewed a battery of a 95% battery but problem is the same.

But after a motion sensor has been activated because of a real motion any sensor works normally again until the next restart of Home Assistant or Deconz.

@Mediacj - Yes, after a real trigger, my motion sensors also function just fine. Good to know that you’ve already tried replacing the battery; I’ll discount the sensor for now as a problem. I also have a Sonoff Zigbee gateway that I’m going to try to pair with one of these “problem-some” sensors. If it works in the Sonoff, I’m just going to do away with the Conbee II.

So I moved 3 of the motion sensors that consistently showed the wrong state after restarting, from Conbee II to the Sonoff Bride. After 4 or 5 reboots, no false triggers; all of the sensors show the correct states after powering up. I’m going to move a couple more and monitor this setup for a few days; but it looks like the Sonoff Bridge is the way to go for me, at least for the motion sensors.

I experienced exactly the same in 3 different installations - all based on Deconz/Conbee2.
Annoying enough (with custom alarm system using motion sensors) to consider changes…

I migrated 6 weeks ago to SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus with Zigbee2MQTT with the full success. Besides of solving Aqara motion sensors issue I am generally MUCH more satisifed with overall stability of the network.

My installations are large - 150+ Zigbee devices, mix of all possible vendors. With Deconz it was a repeating excercise of sensor suddenly disappearing from the network and requring re-pairing. That wasn’t massive - rather 2-3 re-pairings per months which may not be that bad with that size of the network… But that phenomenon seems to completely disappear with the Sonoff+Zigbee2MQTT which is just another benefit.

Consider migration, that’s my recommendation.
The process is quite disturbing - I did not find any way to move devices between dongles… so I just needed to re-pair EVERYTHING in my network (incl. switches hidden in walls :slight_smile:)
Quite time-consuming but I used it as a chance to rename/unify naming for all devices which was my ambition for the long time anyway :slight_smile:

@sgurgul - That’s a pretty impressive network you’ve got there. I have around 35 Zigbee devices and probably around 75-80 devices in total, counting all the other types of devices. I did end up switching all my motion sensors to the Sonoff Bridge, and so far, everything is working out great: all the devices are working reliably, and no more false triggers upon startup.
I did have a couple of sensors leaving the Conbee II in the past that had to be removed and re-paired, but I didn’t think anything of it, figured that it was just “normal” maintenance. I’ll observe the performance of the motion sensor in the Sonoff network for a while, and if solid, will probably switch all my other devices over to the Sonoff bridge. All in all, I do think the Conbee II does require more baby-sitting from the start.

Same her with version 2.19.03, if real a detection of movement is done at it helps (looks like it) i can live with it for a while. But it is a bit annoying to have to take that round after every restart… set “off” value manually does not help more than minutes. Have not seen the same issue with other movement sensors also paired in Deconz like Hue combined PIR temp and light or Konke.
Hope this is fixed soon by Phoscon.

@smurfen - I couldn’t live with that situation because think of the case where you have to be away from your home for several days (vacation/business trip), and for some reason, you have to reboot your host, then your motion sensors will be stuck in the active state without having the ability to reset it. Then you won’t be able to differentiate between a real event vs that stuck state. If you also have automations associated with the sensors being in the active state (setting off alarms, sending SMS or email as examples), then you’re really screwed. Because of that, I moved all my motion sensors to a Sonoff Coordinator and using ZHA. So far it is working well. I am moving all my other Zigbee devices over to ZHA, but not all at once. The goal is to eventually get rid of Deconz/Conbee2. I have 57 devices in my HA setup; I’m half way complete at this point.
Reason why I reboot my host occasionally is because in the past, HA would hang after several days of running. So to prevent that scenario, I reboot once every few days automatically.

It is annoying yes, but what Sonoff coordinator/bridge do you use with ZHA?
Seems like there is a couple of versions with zigbee like those:
SONOFF ZBBridge pro (a white square box)
or
SONOFF Zigbee Dongle Plus (a black dongle with external antenna)
Having many devices on my Conbee II using deconz, but willing to try Sonoff.
Do you have to flash or modify the Sonoff bridge with other firmware than the original?

I am currently using the Sonoff Bridge (WiFi), running ZHA. I have 57 Zigbee devices on that coordinator now, completely freed from Conbee2 and DeConz. It seems a little sluggish to refresh the list of devices, but other than that, all devices are functional. I did have to flash Tasmota on that Sonoff bridge, which to me is not a big deal since all of my Sonoff WiFi devices are running on Tasmota anyway. I did hear from a Youtuber mentioning that the WiFi bridge may run into performance issue once you get to a bigger number of devices (I don’t know what that number is). I do intend on getting a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus at some point in time and switch the radio. That’ll be another day.

Thanks!
I see that the Dongle Plus is described (on aliexpress) as supported in HA using ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt.
It also seems to have many firmware options also that could give better gain like 20dbm vs default 5 dbm.
A bit confusing but google or this community will give some answeres i think.
Large job to move devices i think but as long as both could be up at the same time i can do the migration over some time.

Updated also today deconz addon, and i see the same, after restart Addon, most of the xiaomi sensors are reporting motion … while there is no one home …, didnt have the issue before on 2.19.xx releases…
I hope they go back to off, once i’m home and a real detection was detected

@pergola.fabio - I’m pretty sure you’re seeing what many of us are seeing (or “had” seen in my case). Almost 100% sure that when you got home and trigger the motion sensors, they will reset after the timeout period. If you can live with that, then all will be well. For me though, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I never had a great experience with DeConz/Conbee2; when I did have issues previously, I never was able to find out the root of the problems, as people on the add-on side blame the device firmware and vice-versa. As an ordinary user, I was stuck. So I went from DeConz/Conbee2 to ZHA using a Sonoff ZBBridge (WiFi), to now using Zigbee2MQTT and a Sonoff USB dongle Plus. If you have the means to do so, I do recommend at least trying out Zigbee2MQTT, it has been solid in my setup at home, feature-rich and very predictable. Don’t try Zigbee2MQTT using the Conbee2 though because I’ve seen other people mentioning that this combination has some issues. I retired the Conbee2 dongle and flashed it to be used as a sniffer only. Good luck with your setup.

hi, yes indeed, all is ok now after a real motion detection
I openend a bug report, and seems its a confirmed bug now, probably a fix will come anytime

I bought a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus, just got it installed as a coordinator and trying ZHA now.
I have used Conbee II and Deconz for several years now with a large amount of devices in the mesh.
Just added the first device (aqara multisensor), and i am gonna “migrate” more sensors etc. to see if it works better. I never had large problems with Conbee/Deconz, but some issues with devices falling out of the network so i have to pair them again. But upgrades etc. has done things better end better.

@smurfen - Congrats on your purchase. I think you’ll be happy with the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus. I also purchased one and am currently using that, as my network is also growing rapidly. You may already know about this, but thought I’d mention it anyway: To get the max number of devices, you’ll have to flash the firmware from here: Z-Stack-firmware/coordinator/Z-Stack_3.x.0/bin at master · Koenkk/Z-Stack-firmware · GitHub. It doesn’t take any additional tool to flash, except that you’ll have to remove two screws to get to the button in order to put that into bootstrap mode. After flashing, the coordinator can have 50 direct children, and I believe up to 200 devices total in the network. My network has been very stable, no nodes dropping out, the Ikea and Aqara remote controls have been responsive. Also, I’ve switched to using Zigbee2MQTT and that’s also a plus; I think Zigbee2MQTT has a better user interface, but both should do the job. I also kept the old Sonoff Zigbee Bridge running ZHA as a backup, just in case. Good luck.

@sgurgul - It looks like your recommendation is the way to go. Since the start of this issue, I am now using a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus using Zigbee2MQTT, and have increased the number of devices in my network to around 60 devices. Before taking that plunge, I did do some additional searches, and generally, I found that people are happier with Zigbee2MQTT. After the transition, I learned that using Zigbee2MQTT (and also ZHA), I can pair an end device to any particular routing device. This is great to ensure the best signal path possible between your end devices and the coordinator. I’m not sure if that’s possible with DeConz; I never thought that this feature was even a thing, knowing that Zigbee is an adhoc network, and is self-forming, self-healing. The UI is useful, polished and interesting (just look at the visualization of the Map view - it’s got cool animation and good information relevant to the connections between nodes). I also found the pairing process to be painless and predictable, with useful popup status. I have yet had to re-pair a device because I had to, but because I wanted to, in order to optimize the signal path. A couple of additional benefits of doing a complete changeover is that I can select a specific Zigbee channel of my choosing to minimize interference with my WiFi, and also renamed all my devices to make them more consistent. It’s been several days since I made the switch, and my network is solid as a rock. (knock on wood because it’s RF we’re talking about).
All in all, I’m glad I spent the time to make this jump. This is not an advertisement for one or a bash of the other; I’m just expressing my genuine experience after going through these different integrations.