Zigbee2MQTT woes…

Good lord how difficult is it to get Zigbee2MQTT running inside virtual box… I’ve spent hours with total guesswork and much googling thanks to a ‘cannot start Zigbee’ message that’s as much diagnostic use as a lump of coal.

Gone back to ZHA … may be I’ll try again another day.

(Only wanted to try it as ZHA is draining some device batteries at a rate of knots).

Z2M works great on a number of platforms. If you run it virtualized, then you really have to be careful about making USB passthrough work properly, which can be a pain in many hypervisors.

I really like running z2m on a small SBC like a Raspberry Pi. It allows me to place the zigbee stick in the best place in the house for zigbee device connectivity, which is not in the basement where my big VMware esxi servers are. I use POE to power it, so it uses the same UPS that my switches run off of, but that’s not required.

z2m is super reliable, works well with HA and has great device support. Run it on the right platform and it’s easy and reliable.

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I have ZHA working fine with a COM3 pass thru from the windows host. But setting this in Z2M was confusing and when I did think I’d sorted it something else cropped up and I spent hours moving from one issue to another. Everything else I’ve done on HA so far has been a breeze. MQTT broker is working fine as I have the RingMQTT add on running. I just don’t know why I can’t get Z2M to start, it gives such a generic error.