Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle + zigbe2mqtt need ZHA to update state ... ?whaat?

I faced something strange… and I’m hoping to understand why …
I have:

  • Sonoff ZigBee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus USB stick
  • Aqara smart wall switch H1 EU (with neutral, double rocker) (WS-EUK04 - lumi.switch.n2aeu1)
  • Gledopto 5 in 1 Smart Led Controller (GL-C-001P, seen as GL-C-008P)

Things were going quite ok, the 2 devices added into zigbe2mqtt, I was able to controll the devices from HomeAssistant, except one issue:

The problem: The state of the leds through gledopto and the state of any of the 2 swithces was NOT reported back intro HA.

I tried many things … even took another sdcad and installed a fresh HA. Looking with MQTT explorer it looked like the 2 devices were NOT sending data at all…
But it started to work when I did the following:

  • Stop zigbee2mqtt
  • enable ZHA
  • Add (or they were imported? I don’t remember) devices in ZHA (here it was an unclear question where I’ve selected: “keep existing netweork” or something like this)
  • Play around with gledpro and with the wall switch, happy that they work in ZHA
  • Disabled ZHA and re-started zigbee2mqtt
  • (I don’t remember, maybe - readd devices in zigbe2mqtt)
  • now the same devices work properly !!! They DO send their state back to HomeAssistant.

It was strange, so I put back my initial HomeAssistant SDcard (where it was not working), did the same as above, and … it worked … !
WHY ???

Somewhere on github someone was saying about Aqara that it needs a special “registering to network” to enable the sending of the state values … but … not clear how to trigger that.
So … does anyone has any suggestion … why it is like this ?
Is this … reliable ? or it will be problematic in time … ?

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