Hi,
recently my Raspberry Pi 3 died, so I took the opportunity over the weekend to reinstall HassOS on a Proxmox VM and reimport the latest backup; I also set up the passthrough for the Conbee II USB dongle.
Everything seemed to go well, but after restarting, I noticed that none of my Zigbee devices (26 sensors and lights) reconnected. I left it for the moment, but the next morning, I noticed from the Phoscon app that the devices had reconnected overnight and were responding correctly (e.g., when I open/close a door). So, I assume the dongle is being correctly detected.
However, in Home Assistant, the devices are not detected, even though in the DeCONZ add-on configuration the device is selected (/dev/serial/by-id/usb-dresden_elektronik_ingenieurtechnik_GmbH_ConBee_II_DE2126915-if00) and the API and WebSocket ports are correctly set (40850 and 8081, respectively).
I also noticed that after each reboot (both of HassOS and the DeCONZ add-on), the devices take a long time to reconnect: if I keep the Phoscon app open, I see them reconnecting one by one, and it literally takes hours. On the Raspberry Pi 3, it was almost instant.
Clearly, I’ve tried other Zigbee channels, but it doesn’t change anything, so I’m not sure where the problem is.
Is there a way to fix this that doesn’t require me to manually re-pair all the devices?
Are you using the same dongle?
Your Raspberry Pi died, so I assume you’re using different hardware. What hardware and what else runs on it?
A common problem people have is that their dongle isn’t far away enough from the actual hardware. Since you changed hardware, take a look to see if your dongle is as physically separated as possible from sources of interference (including–and especially–the physical box with the CPU). Given that you’re seeing Zigbee connectivity but with poor quality, it sounds a lot like the problem might be that the Zigbee receiver is being flooded with noise in a way that it wasn’t in your previous Raspberry Pi hardware configuration.
It is recommend to use a USB extension cable
Good points. The new server is a Intel NUC, hosting two VM: one dedicated to home assistant OS and the other dedicated to Frigate.
Yes, I’m using a 1mt extension cable (the same I used on the Raspberry); what I tried:
- change extension cable
- change usb port
- change zigbee channel
- move the entire server to another location
Nothing helps… So I’m prone to exclude interference issues