I have been through all OH 3 major versions, since 2.6 with pretty much positive experience until OH 3.3. OH 3.3 has failed to deliver on control of zigbee enabled devices via Raspbee2, Deconz HAT, Raspbee2 is no longer able to start properly as neither “channel” nor “network id” cannot be set. This remains to be a problem even with OH 3.4 M4. My hardware is RPi 4b + Raspbee2.
Now I am looking for a recipe on how to downgrade back to OH 3.2 until Raspbee2 issue gets resolved. A general approach to regret an upgrade would be nice to be aware of. Thanks in advance
Ideally you’d have a backup created prior to the upgrade to 3.3. So you’d downgrade the software (it’s not clear if you are on openHABian or just a Linux install). If on openHABian I think you can fix the version in openhabian-config. If not, you can fix the version using standard apt commands.
If you don’t have a backup, it’s going to be challenging. I believe there were some significant breaking changes in the JSONDB files that got automatically fixed during the upgrade process. I can’t guarantee that your 3.3 configs will work unchanged on a 3.2 version of OH. But I don’t know they won’t work. So get the software back to OH 3.3 and see what the errors are and fix them one by one. There might need to be some manual changes made to the JSONDB files depending on the errors seen.
I hope you’ve filed an issue with the Deconz add-on. If there isn’t an issue, I doubt it will ever get fixed.
Perhaps it would be easier to manually install the 3.2 version of the binding? Or would that cause other issues?
There is not guaranteed backward comparability. If there are breaking changes in the core between versions, an older add-on won’t run on a newer OH. I think there were such changes between 3.2 and 3.3. But it’s worth a try.
I am impressed how supportive is OH community, and in particular you rlkoshak. Appreciate it. In regard to reporting a bug to Deconz add-on, I did report it after wards. Lessons learned. And really nothing surprisingly new in config management.
What I really wonder is how many of you have chosen zigbee protocol for majority of sensors and what is preferred protocol around OH homes? Same appears when it comes to hardware - thing - gateway that would suit better for zigbee compared to Deconz. I had some not so good experience with Sonoff zigbee hub earlier.
As far as I’m aware, Deconz is only available in Germany or at least Europe so that would make it inavailable to me. I use the Zigbee binding with a USB coordinator (the HUSBZB-1 which is a zwave/zigbee combo). I’ve not had any problems with it and I’ve not encountered anything that didn’t work. But I’m always sure to get devices with the Zigbee logo on it. Too many use “pseudo-zigbee” which are not always well supported.
I have a pretty even mix between Zwave, Zigbee, DIY (which uses MQTT) and cloud APIs.
The majority of my sensors are either DIY and speak MQTT natively, or I have services that sniff Buetooth and extract the values and publish those as MQTT (Govee, and Airwave).