Hi everyone, I wanted to share my experience with setting up and troubleshooting a Zigbee network using the Conbee I stick in my Home Assistant setup. I’ve been working on this for a few weeks now, and I thought it might be helpful to document my journey in case others are facing similar challenges.
Initially, I configured the ZHA component using the Conbee I stick with the latest firmware. I have 11 IKEA lights (GU10 and bulbs) along with a couple of motion and door sensors from Xiaomi. Everything worked perfectly right after setting up Home Assistant. However, after a few hours, things started to go downhill. Devices began responding slowly, and eventually, they all became unavailable. This was frustrating, especially since I had followed all the recommended setup steps.
I noticed that the radio communication was still somewhat intact because I could pair a door sensor and see packets coming in. However, the devices were not responding to any commands. After a restart of Home Assistant, everything worked fine again, but the issue would resurface after a few hours. This cycle was really affecting my ability to rely on my smart home setup.
I decided to dig deeper into the logs to understand what was going wrong. I found that the issue might be related to the watchdog timer settings on the Conbee stick. By adjusting the watchdog TTL parameter, I was able to stabilize the connection. This involved sending specific commands through the zigpy_deconz API to modify the watchdog settings. After making these changes, the network became much more stable, and the devices stopped disconnecting after a few hours.
I also explored other potential causes, such as interference from nearby devices or power supply issues. Ensuring that the Conbee stick was receiving a stable 5V supply and moving it away from other wireless devices helped improve the overall performance. Additionally, I upgraded the firmware on the Conbee stick to the latest version, which seemed to resolve some underlying issues.
If anyone else is experiencing similar problems, I highly recommend checking the watchdog settings and ensuring that the firmware on your Conbee stick is up to date. Also, monitoring the network traffic using the Home Assistant logs can provide valuable insights into what’s going wrong. I’m really glad I was able to figure this out, and I hope this helps others who might be struggling with similar issues!
If you’ve encountered and resolved other Zigbee-related problems, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Let’s keep learning and improving our smart home setups together! 