There is a new driver for the Dongle-E, but it requires flashing new firmware and possibly re-pairing your devices.
May have to do that.
I am re-pairing 20+ devices a week anyway.
There are two stages to re-pairing after an outage.
The first is re-pairing 5-10 devices that are showing unavailable for two hours after a full reboot.
The second is for the devices that are talking to the coordinator and appear to be working but don’t report motion anymore, or temp/humidity/ or don’t respond to commands - open/close blind.
This is another 10 odd devices that only become clear when automated lighting stops working.
So re pairing 145 devices won’t be too bad but will have to wait when I can spare a day or two to do it.
I must admit I am concerned by the ‘experimental’.
Is there another coordinator that will be more reliable?
My wife is getting pretty pissed off about it.
The only coordinators that are not ‘experimental’ in Zigbee2MQTT are the TI-based ones, eg. CC2652, like the Dongle-P
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Actually - I’ll try rebooting Home Assistant every day during the night and see if things stabilise.
I am really enjoying using Home Assistant, I have been building home automation for 30 years form X10 onwards and Home Assistant is the best Home Automation Hub I have used so far.
Many thanks for you replies!!
I have a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus (P?) you recommend I switch to that?
I got an E because it was recommended I use that for Home Assistant - before I just used zigbee2MQTT and MQTT and Node Red.
I moved to Home Assistant at Christmas to reduce the amount of time I had to spend maintaining it.
But so far Home Assistant seems to need a great deal of ‘mothering’ to keep the wheels on
Worth the try.
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The P fixed all my connectivity issues I had with the E. There are quite a few opinions on the matter, but I thought I’d share my personal experience with both devices.
Guys, there are a ton of topics on intermittent connection issues.
This topic is to dicuss the following (not hardware-related) issue:
Some (always the same set of) zigbee devices become not availbale in HA, immediately after a HA restart. However, they show as available in Z2M. Furthermore, actions on them can successfully be triggered via the Z2M interface.
This has nothing to do with hardware and is not a connectivity issue per se.
I wouldn’t pass the issue off as normal. There appears to be a recent connectivity issue between MQTT and Z2M with the recent brightness MQTT changes which would fall under the this thread.
If you use the mosquitto add-on, the suggestion is usually to downgrade to a version that contains mosquitto 2.0.16
As for HA Supervised I always prefer the mosquitto message broker available from the Debian Repositories (2.0.11 by the time of this writing) over the mosquitto add-on available from the HA Add-on store.
Having the broker installed on the OS level doesn’t render HA to “Unsupported” or “Unhealthy”.
Together with the Sonoff P Dongle as the coordinator on Z2M I never experienced connectivity problems so far (except if LQI < 30) on different HA installations.
I attempted to use everything vanilla in Home Assistant to increase chance of it being supported / compatible.
So Home Assistant and all its components are installed and managed by Home Assistant on the VM.
I am using the Mosquito Broker 6.4.0 that it said I was to install for zigbee2MQTT
I currently have ~20 devices reporting <30 despite 8 Ikea zigbee relays and 81 powered devices, 8 of the poor signals are mains powered devices.
The funny thing is devices that report unavailable still respond to commands then become available.
The Hue Hub had no issues with a full load of 50+ lightbulbs but I migrated them to Home Assistant to reduce the number of zigbee networks in the house.
I have shutdown almost all the other zigbee networks.
I am left with one Hue Hub to control the ~20 lights in the lounge, I reluctant to add more devices to Home Assistant right now.
And then there is the Smart Meter zigbee network which I do not have any control over at all.