TCP and/or RFC2217 connection to Ember Zigbee Coordinator

Add-ons Bindings
1

I read through some of the posts I’ve found on this topic, but the newest one is over five years old. I have a new HomeSeer Z-Net Pro which has dual Zwave controller and Zigbee coordinators exposed to the net using port 2001 and 2002 respectively.

I know that openHAB supports both raw tcp and RFC2217 socket connections to remote sockets which is great! And the Zwave Controller Thing works out of the box without problem.

The Ember Zigbee Coordinator does not though. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and I cannot get it to work.

I know there were some issues about this in the past (OH 3 timeframe) and I could not determine if it was ever addressed or if it’s still expected that RFC2217 will not work with Ember coordinators. Does anyone have any recent experience one way or the other?

I can fall back to zigbee2mqtt which does work but I’d much rather make this work with the native Zigbee binding if I can.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this if it’s known not to work. I’ll just cut my losses and pivot. So I['ve not gathered any logs yet beyond the INFO and above level:

2026-04-13 19:04:45.611 [ERROR] [zigbee.dongle.ember.ZigBeeDongleEzsp] - EZSP Dongle: Unable to open serial port

Thanks!

2

I gave up. It’s still unclear if this is known not to work or expected to work.

I fell back to using socat instead. It’s less convenient but not a major pain.

I run in Docker and I didn’t want to build a custom image so I used an init script.

If you are not already, create a folder and set your run command to mount it to /etc/cont-init.d inside the container. All the scripts in this folder will be executed when the container starts up prior to dropping root and starting openHAB.

Place the following script into that folder. Obviously change the IP/host and port as appropriate.

#!/bin/bash

apt update && apt install -y socat

socat PTY,link=/dev/ttyzigbee,rawer,group=dialout,mode=0660 tcp:<IP/HOST>:<PORT> &

This will install socat into the container if it’s not already installed and run it in the background linking that socket to /dev/ttyzigbee. At least for the debian OH image the permissions for /dev/ttyzigbee (really /dev/pts/1) get messed up so we need to make sure the file is a member of dialout and the group has rw permission which is what the user and mode options do.

If you have more than one USB device served using ser2ne or whatever, you can add additional lines to the script above, one for each. Since Zwave continues to work using rfc2217 I just have the one.

But I’ve run into the next problem which may indicate the root problem (though I didn’t see this error before now so RFC2217 may not work after all). The error is

EZSP Dongle: NCP requires unsupported version of EZSP (NCP = V14, supported = V4-V13)

My coordinator is too new. :-(. Guess I have no choice but to use zigbee2mqtt afterall. I might try again when/if the Zigbee binding supports the newer firmware. I’m not keen on installing an older firmware version than the cordinator ships with.