I’ve been having issues lately with my zigbee coordinator (a sonoff stick), where it occasionally disconnects itself from home assistant and stops responding.
For the most part, I use local controls and zigbee bindings on my zigbee network, so I don’t always notice right away when this happens. Usually what makes me notice is the VZM31-SN and VZM35-SN in my bedroom rebooting themselves. (I see the LED indicator blink through three different colors on both switches at approximately the same time). The dimmer switch is in smart bulb mode with some juno zigbee recessed lights, and the restart cuts the power to the “always on” smart bulbs for just long enough to reset them too.
And unfortunately, no matter what configuration I change, the juno smart bulbs always turn on at full brightness when power is first restored. So without warning all the lights in my bedroom turn on at full brightness. Not fun.
Running a zigbee network where the coordinator mysteriously disappears from time to time is obviously not ideal, but I’d expect the switches to be able to handle it without crashing. My best guess as to what’s going on is that something in my network (my money is on the juno bulbs) is freaking out, and sending a flood of traffic, or creating some sort of loop. And then some sort of latent bug in the inovelli firmware causes some sort of overflow or out of memory condition in response to the flood of messages, causing the restart.
Getting juno to try to fix their firmware is likely hopeless. (there’s a long thread about that on these forums). But Inovelli at least releases firmware updates for their products!
I’m hoping that it’s a clue that the same thing happens with both the VZM31 (firmware 2.18) and VZM35 (firmware 1.07). I’ll upgrade the VZM35 to the new 1.08 firmware and see if it happens again, but it’s really the dimmer switch that needs the fix.
My entire zigbee network consists of:
- Sonoff coordinator
- 5 VZM31-SN dimmers
- 2 VZM35-SN fan switches
- 8 Juno canless lights
- 2 Hue color-changing lights
- 1 Sinope zigbee thermostat
I just replaced the sonoff coordinator with the home assistant ZBT-2, which I’m hoping will be more stable.