Hi.
Am fairly new to HA, but have managed to get a ESPHome light reader to send power details over wifi and that’s working well.
I previously had a Z-Stick, but that sh$t the bed, so purchased a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle to connect to other things in the house, but am stuck.
Running HA in vBox on a little windoze (11) pc.
I think the fundamental issue is comms with the sonoff. Its seen in windows as the below:
I’ve tried a few combos of speeds / flow control etc… no go. Tried applying actual drivers to it (some silicon ones via googling / etc) but they ‘wont start, error 10’ and the Serial CH9102 what windows wants to apply seems to be the only one its happy with.
When I pass through to vBox, the USB filter see’s it as a Sonoff device (ITOFF Sonoff Zigbee …etccc), which is odd as I can’t see this in windows device manager anywhere.
I’ve a 2m USB cable with the sonoff dangling up near the rafters, so its away from interference.
HA can see the dongle (via some handy MQTT youtbue videos), but when it goes to talk to it it fails…
Do I need to sort the fundamental windoze issues before trouble shooting HA?
Seeing this sort of thing in HA MQQT logs:
Zigbee2MQTT:error 2023-11-25 19:33:12: Error while starting zigbee-herdsman
I suspect the issue with the mapping of the serial device through your hypervisor to the HASS vm, but my usual approach in complex integration issues is to SIMPLIFY, TEST, BUILD.
Can you install / live boot a bare-metal HAOS image as a test:
This test would remove any issues with the VM and if the Sonoff Zigbee device works, and prove the hardware.
Personally, on a RPi4 HAOS auto-detected a previous version of the Sonoff USB Zigbee radio and “just worked”, but that’s with a pre-configured OS and docker host.
You can then work on mapping the device through to HASS.
I, too, would recommend ditching windows. Yes, yes, I’ve made multiple videos about how to install into VirtualBox on both Windows 10 AND Windows 11 - but that’s really meant for a lab/dev/test environment, not a production environment. Most times, lab/test/dev doesn’t need zigbee or zwave, so hardware passthrough isn’t necessary. It’s for when you want to make some crazy change to the dashboard that you aren’t sure if it’ll blow up the whole thing, or to test out some weird code in your configuration file if you’re worried that it would prevent your production box from booting, that kind of thing.
Hardware passthrough aside, the biggest issue with running on windows is Windows updates and the constant restarts and all that shenanigans. I need my smart home stuff to be stable, and random reboots because of updates that may or may not break something is just totally unacceptable.
Grab yourself a NUC - and no, don’t try to save $4 by buying some off-brand one, the forums are rife with people who bought some brand nobody has ever heard of before and it turns out the NIC isn’t supported so they had to return it anyway. You can get a legit NUC for $209 on Amazon (there’s a link in the description of the video below), and then follow this to get it working in no time flat:
this post!