I’m on OH 4.1.0 and had to replace my TI CC2531EMK Zigbee Coordinator for stability reasons and tried to replace it with a Sonoff Dongle Plus V2 (ZBDongle-E).
The documentation mentions two different firmwares (this one and this one). For the actual flashing I’m using this web flasher, which worked great. Except that when I try to initialize the dongle, I get the following error:
2024-02-09 23:05:34.857 [ERROR] [zigbee.dongle.ember.ZigBeeDongleEzsp] - EZSP Dongle: NCP requires unsupported version of EZSP (required = V12, supported = V4)
I have to admit I’m not a pro on Zigbee, but from what I understood there are multiple firmwares out there that I could flash. Does the error message above mean that I’m flashing a firmware (V4) that’s older than what the binding requires (V12)?
Which documentation? Can you submit a PR to change it so others do not get confused if it is openHAB documentation?
I would not use non genuine firmware, stick with the correct itead/sonoff one and as you did you need to make sure you ID if your using the V1 or V2 (E) hardware.
Also yes I suspect if you ever update the firmware you will have to pull devices out of the walls and push the connect buttons and possibly start over. Zigbee stores the hardware codes on the dongle so wiping the dongle will mean you need to start over. Zwave works the other way and gets stored in openHAB as this is a protocol design. Luckily they stay away from the internet so if you have no problems, just stay on whatever firmware you have now.
If I am wrong then please feel free to write and correct me.
I’d love to do that, since I really enjoy improving documentations, mostly because (being a non-pro) I’d like to spare others the frustration I went through, and to lower the overall hurdle to start with Zigbee on openHAB.
However, to be entirely honest, I became somewhat hesitant to improve the Zigbee documentation.
Short story: Judging from the time it took me (as a non-pro) to get my Sonoff Coordinator running, and from the number of (avoidable) dead-ends I took during that, the Zigbee-binding-documentation maybe leaves some room for improvement for those who’re newcomers as well. So I started improving the documentation myself and submitted a PR with more precise information on how to avoid ordering the wrong Sonoff-stick (Update README.md - Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2 by Boldfor · Pull Request #824) and one to explain when to go with the openHAB-Zigbee-binding, which was a complete mystery to me (Update README.md - Comparison with Zigbee2MQTT by Boldfor · Pull Request #825). I planned to submit more, because I noticed that the documentation could easily be improved for clarity for other newcomers, and Zigbee is such a crucial element of openHAB.
After some discussion, the latter PR was considered as not helpful (even though this information would’ve helped me a lot as a non-pro, and I would’ve loved to do more iterations until it met the requirement for the documentation), and the first one is still pending (I believe it also won’t be merged).
So I was like “ok, then maybe it’s not intended to make it easier for newcomers to dive into the topic”, since I would’ve loved to invest more time.
Minor clarification: if you update a ZBDongle-E with the Silabs web flasher noted above (EZSP to newer EZSP), you shouldn’t need to reconnect devices. I imagine that you’d need to reconnect devices if you switch to a different firmware, though.
What I meant: When you get a new USB Coordinator, and try out different firmwares (which is what I did unfortunately), and wonder why the coordinator won’t go online in OH even if you flash the official itead firmware, you have to remove the thing and add it again in OH. Just flashing a new firmware and expecting that OH can bring the coordinator online is a mistake.
In my case, I got suspicious when I read everywhere that my dongle was supposed to work with the itead firmware, but didn’t.
