I decided to remove my Hue Bridge and just use ZHA, as part of simplifying my configurations. Install of ZHA and set up went straightforward, however, the Zigbee network seems to give up after a number of hours.
The network is not large:
Room 1 has four Hue lights and two hue dimmer switches
Room 2 has one Hue light and one dimmer switch, this also has my HA RPi and the Skyconnect device (Skyconnect has Firmware: 7.1.1.0 build 273).
Room 3 has one Hue light and dimmer switch
Room 4 has a Woolley Smart Plug (added after the move)
Room 5 has four Hue lights and one hue dimmer switch
All the Hue devices have been working fine until the move and the problem occurred before I plugged in the Smart Plug, which by the way starts flashing blue when the zigbee network fails and stops flashing when I reboot HomeAssistant.
Everything seems to function just fine then (normally when nothing has been happening for a period of time the network seems to just die. Next time I try to turn light on or off nothing happens then after some seconds I get an error message on the HA app:
Failed to call service light/turn_on. Failed to send request:
Failed to deliver message: <EmberStatus.DELIVER_FAILED:102>
Can anybody point me in the right direction for solving this please. A reboot fixes it but I can’t ask wife to do that if she walks into a room and tries to turn a light on.
I think the latest firmware is 7.3.1.0, so you could try updating that. It’s very easy with the Silicon Labs flasher add-on, which defaults to the SkyConnect latest version.
Otherwise, I believe Hue bridges have a much larger antenna that it’s possible to fit into a SkyConnect dongle, so it may be that this was masking weaknesses in your zigbee network. I notice that you only have one router device in the same room as your coordinator, which means that a lot of traffic will be passing through it now - before, the Hue bridge may have been connecting directly with devices in other rooms. Maybe try moving the Woolley smart plug into that room to see if it helps? If it does, a “repeater” router in that room might do the trick.
There’s a very thorough discussion of how to achieve a robust network here:
Well, Finally, with Christmas and New Year over I got time to have a look at this.
1: I upgraded HASS to the latest level - 2024.1.2. (I see there is now a 2024.1.3).
2: I upgraded Skyconnect to the latest firmware level : 7.3.1.0 build 176
3 Having read the zigbee doc I spotted I had my Skyconnect plugged into a USB3 port. I moved that to a USB2 port. I think this was the key change, until then the zigbee network would fail two or three times a day for no apparent reason.
Major success, the zigbee network has not ‘died’ for 72 hours.
I do have a couple of Hue switches that seem to have disappeared and I cant get them back, I’ll tackle this again, possibly with some new batteries tomorrow. However prior to disappearing they were reporting close to 100% battery.
I’ve put some extraplug sockets in which are only being used as routers. I’ve had to do this as my wife has insisted I remove the Hue lights from the kitchen that seems is a pivotal point in my zigbee network as our bungalow is T shaped and the kitchen is right on the junction.
Now, I still have several grey and red lines on the network map, in places where I’d ideally like them to be green. I read that if I turn the coordinator off for at least 30 mins the network would panic and reconfigure. Is that correct? I’m not sure it would necessarily fix the problem as it could just end up with the same layout as before, can I force a connection (I’m running ZHA to reconfirm)