ZHA and two hubs (Sonoff Dongle-M)

[timid stirrup]

I am living in an old barnyard and I have created myself a hobby shack, office and guest room. These shall be integrated into my HA installation and as house and shack share many components like doorbells, cameras, weather station... I want to have it in a single instance.
So my hope was that I can add two ZigBee hubs to the system that control a separate zone. Unfortunately, whenever I add one of the two dongles, ZHA migrates all existing devices from the house to the shack or from the shack to the house. Even when I select "Manually -> Create new network" the last hub added is shown as the networks hub and the other hub is inside it managed by the last integrated one.
I tried every way but no chance. So either there is a bug, an unknown config.yaml I never found or the button "Add Hub" needs to be renamed into "Replace Hub".

[proven trout]

You can only have one Zigbee network at a time when using ZHA and you can only have 1 coordinator on a ZigBee network.

If you want to have have two ZigBee networks then the best solution is for you to use ZHA for one of them and use Zigbee2MQTT for the other.

[swift fern]

Or two z2m feeding into one mqtt

[proven trout]

yes, this is an option too but I imagine in this situation most would want to keep their original network set up the way it is currently being used in and is working.

[timid stirrup]

Actually I love the comfort of ZHA that directly accepts know devices and adds them to the system in a very usable and direct way.

That ZigBee thing is not ready for use out in the wild. For each brand you need their hub and their cloud and their integration, or you need to program every single click manually in Z2M.

[proven trout]

z2m doesn't require hubs, devices pair to z2m directly and get exposed to HA via MQTT.

[timid stirrup]

z2m is very versatile, but not very comfortable. While ZHA is very comfortable but not very versatile. If I would have a free wish, I would suggest sort of a ZigBee Broker service. That thing just collects hubs and devices and manages the connectivity. You can then select which device is handled by what integration. That way you could handle multiple hubs and you can forward supported devices to ZHA and manual devices to z2m. Currently, in my installation, I would need 6 hubs: two Hue Bridges, one hub for ZHA as it works to day and another Hub for z2m that covers a few of the M9pro units that currently require z2m for the house and another hub for the shack purely for another z2m instance.

[timid stirrup]

Actually, how to get two instances of z2m running? If I have to go the more manual way, then I would like to got the same way for all devices. But I need 2 hubs. Is there a manual how to install 2 time z2m?

@proven trout How do you call the thing, if it is not a hub? A dongle? Sonoff suggest that with their naming convention like Dongle Plus and Dongle-M?

[proven trout]

I am not sure if there is an easy to way to do it on HAOS but you can spin it up in containers on another system.

[proven trout]

things like the "hue bridge" hub is just a coordinator. you dont need it. you can connect the zigbee devices directly to your mesh run by the coordinator attached to HA.

[timid stirrup]

@proven trout Okay... How do I get all the nice scenes from Hue, I thought these do run in the Hue Bridge?

Scenes, motion scenes and not to forget the TV link with ambilight

[proven trout]

if you need to use specially those scenes then sure using the bridge makes sense but for most stuff you can probably achieve something similar, although I do not know the specifics.

[timid stirrup]

That sounds like a lot of work to find out about all the LED parameters. I do have quite a lot of Hue in and around the house... I surely do not want to re-do all the stuff that the Philips guys designed into these devices.

[proven trout]

that's fine but but you can't complain about the way it integrates if your using a third party hub with specific connection requirements.

[timid stirrup]

Spinning up another and another VM is surely one thing, but then I loose the option to manage everything from the HA app and web page? And btw I am using pre-made VMs but adding another set of IP and then linking thinghs together manually that where found by the local integration automatically...

@proven trout I do not complain about Hue as it is integrated perfectly. And with the option to add a secondary bridge as range extender, my Hue problems are very likely completely solved.

My argument is not directly a rant on the hard work of any developer. I am just poking around with the problems of a bigger installation and I find a lot of pit-holes. Some unexpected by me, some probably because these bigger installations are not so common?

[proven trout]

whilst probably less common, a lot of people have pretty large installs.

[timid stirrup]

But how do they solve it?

[proven trout]

although realistically the bigger the setup the more likely the person is to be able to self support stuff.

[proven trout]

I am still not really sure what you are even trying to solve.

[timid stirrup]

Okay, stay with me another 10 Minutes and I explain?

[proven trout]

if you can explain your current behaviour and your ideal expected behaviour maybe I can point you in the right direction.

[timid stirrup]

I have two buildings on the place that share a single network and a single server running a few instances of everything you need. As the buildings are from 188x and one even wasn't even a home but a cow staple, I have to improvise a lot and use HA to replace wires that are not existing.

I added friends of hue switches to control lights where you had to run through a room in the dark to the wall switch and so on. You need to go to the kitche to control the outdoor lighting ...

I added floor heating that was manuallly controlled and now it runs on a heating integration of HA using valves driven by shellys and Sonoff ZB thermometers as references

Now I want to add my newly built home lab, office and radio shack to the whole system. The lab uses a shelly wall display but the two rooms should use guest friendly but "upped" wall switches. So I thought oh, ZigBee, Tuya M9pro, look nice, are aluminum, let's add them.

Now I bought a set of these to be able to control Hue and shelly controlled lights, SONOS speakers and have some comfort through the display showing the meaning of the buttons, the time and the weather.

But as easy as it sounded, as hard was the landing. No support of the M9pro in ZAH, no second Dongle in ZHA. So testing z2m reveals, I could run the M9pro the "complicated" way but now I have two separate systems for solving one problem.

Finally as these M9pro look and feel quite nice, I want to add three of these to the house as well, so I need to move my heating solution from ZHA to z2m to copy my still to be developed solution from the still to be created VM for the shack back to the still to be created VM for the house.