I've recently acquired a ZBT-2 and some Ikea smart home gubbins. I've installed home assistant os on a mac mini I found in a cupboard, connected the thread radio and got the firmware set up and all. Now when I go into the app on my android phone, it fails at the "checking connectivity" stage and says "Can't reach device — make sure that your phone is connected to Wi-Fi". I've gone and synced my thread credentials and made sure ipv6 is working and so on and so forth, so I'm a bit stuck here. I've attached some logs from the border router service which might be helpful? I have no idea how to interpret them really.
#can't connect to thread devices using zbt-2
frail sphinx
kindred trout
how is your home network set up? Do you have any vlans or subnets?
frail sphinx
no nothing like that, I checked everything's on the same 2.4ghz network
kindred trout
hmm. It's possible that you might be hitting a known issue where android can't find the thread border router via mdns. Something you can try is go to the Open Thread Border Router App (Add-on), config tab, and enable the Beta version. That includes some mdns changes that might allow your phone to find the thread border router.
frail sphinx
yeah, still no dice unfortunately
worth noting I also tried on my iphone and that similarly gives me "paring failed" after a while
kindred trout
some people have run into issues where their wifi router was unfortunately blocking communication between the phone and the thread border router :(
what equipment are you using for wifi?
frail sphinx
the router that came with the house lol
actually does it matter if the machine running ha is connected to ethernet instead of wifi
kindred trout
running home assistant on wifi is generally not recommended
but in some poorly engineered wifi systems provided by isps, devices on wifi aren't able to talk to the home assistant border router on ethernet
Someone else ran into that recently, you can see their thread here: https://discord.com/channels/330944238910963714/1468988236700586084
That said, hmm. your logs have some "channel access failure" warnings. That might mean that your thread network is on a channel which has a lot of interference.
do you know what channel your thread network and 2.4ghz wifi networks are on?
frail sphinx
my 2.4ghz network is on 6, 5ghz on 36 and thread on 20
I would try running it off the wifi but it doesn't look as if the mac mini's drivers are included in haos?
I guess I could try on a raspberry pi or something
kindred trout
2.4ghz channel 6 and thread channel 20 are very close together. You might want to try moving your wifi network to channel 1 or thread network to channel 25
(note that if you've enabled the OTBR app "beta", you might need to turn that back off in order to adjust the thread channel - some folks have reported communication issues between the home assistant UI and beta otbr addon)
