Zigbee2mqtt devices found but there's no option to control them

Installation
1

Hi.

Recently, to get the Philips festiva string lights to be configured in Zigbee2mqtt I installed the dev branch. Once I had installed it I noticed that I could no longer control any of my lights in home assistant, so i reverted back to my previous backed up install of z2m but I still wasn’t able to control the lights.
A fresh reinstall and re-pairing all my lights again and still cannot control them in home assistant.

I can control the lights normally in z2m and they show up as devices in home assistant, but I only get the diagnostic information and power-on behaviour, no button to control them.

I’m not great with mqtt but i’ve tried listening to the messages published to “homeassistant/#” and I only messages published to homeassistant/update/Device_id/update/config.

Can someone help me solve this?

2 Likes
2

Welcome!

I would install and use this tool (link below) to have a look at the MQTT messages from/to Zigbee2MQTT. I would look to see if you chose a ‘friendly name’ for the devices that might causing some issues. Spaces and other ‘special’ characters in this name might cause some issues with the MQTT topic name that is generated by Zigbee2MQTT and used as the base for communicating between Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT.

You should be able to figure out how to ‘craft’ a JSON MQTT message to control the device via MQTT using MQTT Explorer, if this works then I would think the issue might be in HA creating the devices from it’s ‘auto discovery’ info.

The whole ‘auto discovery’ of MQTT (and even other) devices by Home Assistant can be a little odd and hard to get your brain around IMHO. I am kind of old skool and manually create my MQTT devices in YAML in HA, yes a bit of a pain but you have full control and learn a lot about your device properties and commands. Good hunting!

3

Thanks for the answer!

I’ve looked around on MQTT explorer and from what I can tell everything looks normal. My /config messages look like this:

{
    "availability": [
       { 
           "topic": "zigbee2mqtt/bridg/state" 
       }
    ],
"brightness":true,
"brightness_scale":254,
"color_mode":true,
"command_topic": "zigbee2mqtt/bedroom_desk_light_rbgwb/set",
"device": {
    "identifiers": [
"zigbee2mqtt_0x2c1165fffea8d66d"
],
"manufacturer":"IKEA",
"model": "TRADFRI LED bulb E14 470 lumen, opal, dimmable, white spectrum, color spectrum (LED1925G6)",
"name": "bedroom_desk_light_rbgwb", "sw_version":"1.0.021"},
"effect":true,
"effect_list": [
    "blink",
    "breathe",
    "okay",
    "channel_change",
    "finish_effect",
    "stop_effect"
],
"json_attributes_topic": "zigbee2mqtt/bedroom_desk_light_rbgwb",
"max_mireds": 454,
"min_mireds": 250,
"name": null,
"object_id": "bedroom_desk_light_rbgwb",
"origin": {
    "name": "Zigbee2MQTT",
    "sw": "1.33.2",
    "url": "https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io"
},
"schema": "json",
"state_topic": "zigbee2mqtt/bedroom_desk_light_rbgwb",
"supported_color_modes": [
    "xy",
    "color_temp"
],
"unique_id": "0x2c1165fffea8d66d_light_zigbee2mqtt"
}

Adding the lights manually seem like a daunting task, so I hope there is a possible fix for this.

4

Hi Johan, did you find a way to fix this issue? I seem to have the same problem as you did…