#Need help with zigbee device losing connectivity

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

river vine
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Hi guys

So I got some zigbee stuff last year based on people recommendations (door sensors, Sky Connect, buttons and recently some Ikea tradfri smart bulbs) because of how great everything sounded with it - instant on/off, no reliance on cloud, great battery life - it sounded great. Unfortunately, it seems too good to be true because it's been the worst investment of my (smallish) smart home so far. We've got 17 Shelly in wall relays that have been perfect and local and super fast and are brilliant, yet zigbee keeps dropping out and sometimes taking 10s+ to update/turn on etc, and even though the only battery things I have are 3 aqara door sensors, I've had to change the battery on those three sensors at least 3-4 times each over the past year .

For reference, I have two aqara zigbee door sensors on either end of my garage doors, a skyconnect, 3 tradfri bulbs and a tradfri signal repeater in the middle of everything. I know that it's how things are set up which aren't great, but I don't know how to figure out what's wrong so I know how to fix it. I imagine I probably need more repeaters, but being in Australia it's hard to get ones that are Australian compliant for not too crazy. The only things I've seen are extra smart plugs, so I might have to get one or two of them

The zigbee bulbs I have are all connected to one wall switch, which was turned off accidentally the other night. I just went to turn it on to connect it to to HA but it's just showing as unavailable. No logs, no connection, nothing I can do about it in HA. I've already got an extension cable for my skyconnect. There's been times when I open the garage door and the lights don't turn on - I check ZHA on my phone and the doors are there and visible, but it just doesn't update that the actual door has opened

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As I said, I'd like to figure out why this is happening so I know what I need to do to fix it, but I don't even know where to start. It's probably the fact that I need more repeaters, but I don't know how to check that out, so I'm not sure how to continue with it. If anyone has any suggestions on where to look or what to check for, that'd be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: also as a side note, while writing this I restarted HA and my skyconnect has just... stopped working? It says to check the logs but I can't see anything in the logs for skyconnect or anything, so not sure what else to look for?

void spruce
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So there is a lot to digest here. Zigbee and Wifi will interfere with one another so the very first step is to make sure your zigbee channel is as far away from your wifi channel(s) as possible.
The ideal zigbee setup is the coordinator should be in the middle of all your zigbee devices. The extenders/routers won't ever be a flawless means of extending a zigbee network and you should never try and use back to back extender/routers to stretch it's reach.

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The skyconnect has no external antenna so it's range out of the box won't be as good as other coordinators that do.

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If you have a lot of wifi devices and they are close to your zigbee devices, there will be interference no matter what. Zigbee is a lower power 2.4Ghz and Wifi is a much stronger 2.4Ghz so Zigbee will always lose out

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So far in my experience Zigbee is a means of offloading stuff that has no business eating up my wifi signal and as I reduced the amount of wifi devices in my home, my zigbee network got better but nothing tops when I moved my coordinator to the middle of my home rather than on one side. devices that connect directly to the coordinator rarely have any issues.

charred vapor
river vine
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also my skyconnect is in the middle of my house (where my HA box is), but my sensors and lights and whatnot are towards the front, so unfortunately i can't get them closer without extenders

river vine
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also i should say that after about half an hour of my entire zigbee network being down the other day, it just magically came up without me needing to do anything, so at least it's working again

charred vapor
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But as HA OS on bare metal? In a VM? Docker?

river vine
charred vapor
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Ah, proxmox 😁

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Other than a full VM reboot, does anything cause the passed through USB and serial ports to not function like this?

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Like, does the integration fail to start after it is already running? Or only in startup?

river vine
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so it failling the other day was the first time i've seen the skyconnect not connect

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normally devices just don't respond but the skyconnect is usually at least still connected

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but because i wasn't watching for when skyconnect failed, i don't know if it happened while it was running or during a restart

visual cove
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Ive noticed the sane behaviour the latest weeks, my zigbee network becomes unavailable with a gap of 1-2h. Skyconnect passthroughed to my vm in unraid. Using the supplied extension ofc

river vine
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huh, that's so weird?

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i wonder if they're related?

charred vapor
visual cove
charred vapor
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That isn't something that would cause the integration to go unavailable

void spruce
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the skyconnect had always been flaky for me. I stopped using it. It got to the point where I had to reload the zha integration via an automation every 3 days and even then would still have occasional issues. I know it wasn't zha because it worked perfectly fine on a different coordinator.

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my skyconnect was connected via the lead more than a foot away from the device it was plugged into

river vine
visual cove
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Network still flaky..

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NcpResetCode.ERROR_EXCEEDED_MAXIMUM_ACK_TIMEOUT_COUNT

visual cove
void spruce
visual cove
visual cove
analog hill
# river vine Hi guys So I got some zigbee stuff last year based on people recommendations (d...

Check the label on your zigbee dongle and make sure it says skyconnect, not ZBT-1.

There's a reported issue with the voltage regulator in ZBT-1 devices failing when plugged into some PC ports and although yours hasn't failed, it could be overheating and that might possibly cause disconnection.

If you do have a ZBT-1, the details are at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/10/02/connect-zbt1-issue-and-replacement/

Home Assistant
Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 issue and replacement

Through extensive testing, we’ve found a fault, but we’re setting up a replacement program.

visual cove
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Mine is a skyconnect but feels like it has the issues if a ZBT-1…

analog hill
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I don't think it will be if it is labelled skyconnect, but you can look for that tell tale mark anyway:

zbt1-issue.jpg
charred vapor
river vine
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and fair enough - since it still works it seems like i have a skyconnect then, right?

visual cove
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Have orded myself a sonoff zigbee plus stick thats arriving tomorrow, hoping for better luck with it.. and using the skyconnect for only thread

charred vapor
visual cove
charred vapor
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It'll be in the debug log file generated by the ZHA integration once you disable debug logging

visual cove
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the more you know, lets have a look

charred vapor
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Can you upload more of the log?

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It looks like the whole integration is reloading, which likely is happening due to a custom component that's using up too much CPU time

visual cove
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now that i know how the log works ill start it again. last file was 500mb lol

visual cove
charred vapor
visual cove
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this is the log for one of my lights

charred vapor
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What light specifically?

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Can you take a screenshot of its Zigbee network info (or upload the diagnostics JSON for the device)?

visual cove
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light.boll, but it's all lights.

image.png
visual cove
charred vapor
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Hmm, I'm not seeing that device in your log. Try to ZIP it up, the 400MB should shrink very quickly.

visual cove
charred vapor
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Looks like you have a CPU usage issue. Any time you see Connection to the radio has been lost: <NcpFailure(code=<NcpResetCode.ERROR_EXCEEDED_MAXIMUM_ACK_TIMEOUT_COUNT: 81>)> in the log, this is your Zigbee coordinator's firmware resetting because ZHA was unable to respond to it for 6+ seconds.

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This usually happens if you have a custom component that is hogging the asyncio event loop or a component/addon using so much CPU that the event loop is heavily stuttering

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ZHA usually acknowledges coordinator messages in the same event loop cycle and in a separate thread, there isn't much else that can be done to speed it up

visual cove
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hmm ok, how do i find the culprate? or should i see over cpu pinning for the vm?

visual cove
visual cove
visual cove
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thinking back this is prob what happend when i tried changing to conbee just that it totaly flaked out upon firmware reset

visual cove
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Fired up a new vm with only sonoff stick. Same issue. This whole ordeal started after changing mobo and cpu on server…