How to get Sonoff Zigbee ZBDongle-E working

Setup, Configuration and Use 1.x Compatibility
1

Raspberry pi 3B+, openHABIAN,
confirmed the working of the dongle-E plus zigbee light in Home Assistant all working ok.
but in openHAB status OFFLINE and COMM:ERROR.
tried a .things file but same problem.
log:tail shows:
EZSP Dongle: Unable to open serial port
14:37:54.848 [INFO ] [hab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing ‘zigbee:coordinator_ember:b28240e17d’ changed from OFFLINE (COMMUNICATION_ERROR) to OFFLINE: Failed to open communications port
Have I been overlooking something? According to what I read here:

the dongle-E should be supported in openHAB?

2

Welcome to the community.
Did you complete the steps to configure your serial port in openhabian Config tool System Settings then option 35

Also did you review the Docs for ZIgbee binding?

3

Thank you for the hint! Did the serial port configuration in the openhabian-config. Now it shows /dev/ttyS0.
dongle was and is still visible as:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Nov 4 16:21 usb-ITead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_505246f072e7ed11a8ac606262c613ac-if00-port0 → …/…/ttyUSB0
However, if I add manually as Ember Coordinator it remains in INITIALIZING and log:tail shows:
16:23:46.129 [INFO ] [openhab.event.FirmwareStatusInfoEvent] - Firmware status of thing zigbee:coordinator_ember:a3f9e5b844 changed to UNKNOWN.
(I have not flashed the device, used out of the box)

4

Review this doc also.

5

added the EXTRA_JAVA_OPTS, checked user write permissions, used .things file and used UI but status jumps from OFFLINE to ONLINE and back to OFFLINE (see tail:log)
21:01:40.466 [INFO ] [hab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing ‘zigbee:coordinator_ember:0ce24cf968’ changed from UNINITIALIZED to INITIALIZING
21:01:40.592 [INFO ] [openhab.event.FirmwareStatusInfoEvent] - Firmware status of thing zigbee:coordinator_ember:0ce24cf968 changed to UNKNOWN.
21:02:31.061 [INFO ] [hab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing ‘zigbee:coordinator_ember:0ce24cf968’ changed from INITIALIZING to ONLINE
21:02:40.435 [INFO ] [hab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing ‘zigbee:coordinator_ember:0ce24cf968’ changed from ONLINE to OFFLINE (COMMUNICATION_ERROR)
21:02:41.433 [INFO ] [gbee.handler.ZigBeeCoordinatorHandler] - ZigBee dongle inactivity timer. Reinitializing ZigBee

6

Be sure to initialise the network - in the coordinator configuration, click advanced settings, then click initialise and save.

7

after some fiddling in the .things file I found that baud rate 57600 works for about 15 seconds to show status ONLINE.
This continues with a period OFFLINE and then again ~15 seconds ONLINE.
Can’t figure out what to do to get the dongle permanent ONLINE. What else could I check in the configuration or log files?

8

I don’t think 57600 is going to be correct unless you have some non standardd firmware loaded?.

Did you do the initialisation I suggested above? Otherwise enable debug logging so you can see what is going on.

9

Do you mean the field in UI ’ Reinitialize Controller’ under ‘ZigBee Network Configuration’ in the UI? So in order to activate that I should remove the .things file and use the UI to configure the coordinator?
I modified ‘debug=maximum’ in the config file but where doe I find the debug logging?

10

changed to configuration in UI but still get the alternating ONLINE/OFFLINE

11

Yes.

This is probably easiest.

Alternatively, if you are using textual configuration, then you will need to change the configuration in the config file, restart the dongle, then change the configuration back to remove the initialisation parameter

I don’t really know what you’ve done here? Did you find this documented somewhere or did you just try something randomly?

You should try reading the docs - there is a section on logging.

I assume you have changed back to using 115k2 and not 57k6? In any case, if you don’t initialise the dongle, it won’t work so I expect this is your problem.

12

I found this text in the documents in relation to openHabian install:
This document is meant to give a guiding hand to users when their openHABian install fails either on initial image installation or later on when running menu options that install or configure optional components.

TIP

TLDR

(opens new window) Set debugmode=maximumin /etc/openhabian.conf and see /boot/first-boot.log for image installation else record the terminal output.

Please do not ask for help on the forum unless you have read this guide.

changed back to 115k2, hardware flow control and High RAM but no improvement.
had openHabian install to be shure of a perfect install but think to do a fresh Linux install.

13

did you follow this for setting logging?
https://www.openhab.org/addons/bindings/zigbee/#when-things-don-t-appear-to-be-working

Since you are specifically triaging the ZigBee binding and controller issue you should focus on Zigbee related documentation.

14

This is not related to openhab logging - this is something to do with openhabian by the looks of it.

Changing the concentrator configuration is unlikely to make a lot of difference if the network isn’t working. Please try and focus on performing the initialisation as suggested as I think that’s more likely to be your problem. Changing other random configuration is more likely to cause confusion than be helpful. If not, at least getting the debug logging output will help show what’s happening and we can make educated decisions…

One suggestion… It seems to me (and apologies if I’m wrong) that you’re probably not a long term user of openHAB. Probably the textual configurations is therefore not the best way to start out and you’d be better trying to configure everything through the UI which would be a lot easier.

15

thank you for the suggestions. Run openHAB for some time to control an number of sonoff switches (with help of delid4ve (Delid4ve) · GitHub) and that works surprisingly good.
now testing to add the sonoff Zigbee dongle-E but turns out to be quite something else. will set up the logging as suggested by justanoldman and start a new test.
you may close this topic as I will come back if I master the Zigbee binding a little better.

16

So as a fyi @chris is in fact the maintainer and the SME for anything and everything Zigbee his advice is always the best to follow since he is also the one that can make any code changes regarding Zigbee binding I would highly recommend following any suggestions he offers as he is the most knowledgeable about how Zigbee and OpenHab interact and work together