It's Zigbee again! Why is it stopping working?

[petro_cz 31]

Friends, I'm getting pretty annoyed with how long zigbee has been beta and worse, how it works, I switched the lights to HUE bridge instead and linked it as an app with HC3! But I still have some sensors on the zigbee directly to the HC3 gateway! I don't understand why HUE works absolutely flawlessly and HC3 loses connection with zigbee devices every now and then! The saddest thing is that some sensors are a meter away from the gateway and despite that they are unreachable! After restarting the gateway they go for a while and then again without communication! Same with the sockets. I don't understand that no one has been able to make any improvements to make this work, some Chinese toy handles this protocol better!  Does anyone have any solution to solve this problem ? Thank you

 

[Sankotronic 2,370]

Hi @petro_cz ,

 

8 hours ago, petro_cz said:

some Chinese toy handles this protocol better! 

 

Can you please share with community which "Chinese toy" do yo refer to?

[Neo Andersson 230]

btw, i found Zigbee devices still unreliable too. Not saying that it doesnt work, if someone can cope with some frustrating disconnections, (mostly for me it happens after electricity outages), but it is far far away from reliable. And Sankotronic has absolute right, because some brands are working pretty flawlessly some dont. Still  we dont use them at all in installations as far as there is any alternative in Zwave.

[petro_cz 31]

22 hours ago, Sankotronic said:

 @petro_cz,

 

Can you please share with community which "Chinese toy" do yo refer to?

 

Lidl Ikea Hue price 60€ ..... since I converted the lights to Hue, without a single outage and everything absolutely fast! 

Edited December 14, 2024 by petro_cz

[Fyase 11]

21 hours ago, Neo Andersson said:

btw, i found Zigbee devices still unreliable too. Not saying that it doesnt work, if someone can cope with some frustrating disconnections, (mostly for me it happens after electricity outages), but it is far far away from reliable. And Sankotronic has absolute right, because some brands are working pretty flawlessly some dont. Still  we dont use them at all in installations as far as there is any alternative in Zwave.

 

I have 26 Zigbee devices along with 30 Z-wave devices.

 

To have a very reliable Zigbee network but not with Fibaro. I have to switch with this fantastic piece of software ( with Zigbee2MQTT )

 

With this amount of devices network is very stable but I have to admit that Z-wave device are better in terms of transmission power.

 

Raffaele

Edited December 14, 2024 by Fyase

[Sankotronic 2,370]

1 hour ago, petro_cz said:

Lidl Ikea Hue price 60€ ..... since I converted the lights to Hue, without a single outage and everything absolutely fast! 

 

Hi @petro_cz,

 

So, on that Lidl, Ikea or Hue hub, besides lighting you also have other zigbee devices included from other manufacturers like motion sensors, smart plugs etc.?

What I want to say is, that all kind of devices from all kind of manufacturers are working flawlessly with this Lidl, Ikea or HUE hub? (I know that HUE hub can be excluded immediately )

 

To explain myself. I know that there are ZigBee gateways or hubs that flawlessly work with devices from the same manufacturer, but when you start including other manufacturer devices then there is no guarantee that will work properly or even work at all.

For example, Philips HUE hub is working great with their bulbs and devices, but when you try others that are not declared as compatible with HUE hub then usually you face a problem. I included 3 INNR smart plugs and they work, but can't be OTA updated.

 

Fibaro HC3 job is in this matter much more difficult since it has to be compatible with devices from other manufacturers. As ZigBee is not that strict with communication protocol rules, problems that users have are expected. Not to mention that ZigBee uses 2.4GHz band same as WiFi and that depending on the selected channels there can be clashes and lots of problems. I know that from the past with my HUE hub and my WiFi router. Very often there were unreachable bulbs or missed communication. For that reason I do not like ZigBee and will never like it. One HUE hub is just enough and only because I like their bulbs, nothing more.

 

Z-wave is more expensive with good reason, and for that reason is more reliable than ZigBee will ever be.  

 

 

 

[Carsten6000 0]

Has anyone had trouble getting Hue into HC3?

 

I had it working for a period and now I´m not able to make it work. Any thoughts?

 

The settings in advanced seem to have disappeared.

 

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Please login or register to see this attachment.

[petro_cz 31]

15 hours ago, Sankotronic said:

 

Hi @petro_cz,

 

So, on that Lidl, Ikea or Hue hub, besides lighting you also have other zigbee devices included from other manufacturers like motion sensors, smart plugs etc.?

What I want to say is, that all kind of devices from all kind of manufacturers are working flawlessly with this Lidl, Ikea or HUE hub? (I know that HUE hub can be excluded immediately )

 

To explain myself. I know that there are ZigBee gateways or hubs that flawlessly work with devices from the same manufacturer, but when you start including other manufacturer devices then there is no guarantee that will work properly or even work at all.

For example, Philips HUE hub is working great with their bulbs and devices, but when you try others that are not declared as compatible with HUE hub then usually you face a problem. I included 3 INNR smart plugs and they work, but can't be OTA updated.

 

Fibaro HC3 job is in this matter much more difficult since it has to be compatible with devices from other manufacturers. As ZigBee is not that strict with communication protocol rules, problems that users have are expected. Not to mention that ZigBee uses 2.4GHz band same as WiFi and that depending on the selected channels there can be clashes and lots of problems. I know that from the past with my HUE hub and my WiFi router. Very often there were unreachable bulbs or missed communication. For that reason I do not like ZigBee and will never like it. One HUE hub is just enough and only because I like their bulbs, nothing more.

 

Z-wave is more expensive with good reason, and for that reason is more reliable than ZigBee will ever be.  

 

 

 

Hey, maybe you don't understand me! But my point is that fibaro excludes all zigbee devices once in a while! So I'm not dealing with compatibility, I understand that you can't serve everything with one gateway, but I'm concerned about the stability of the network and the already connected devices, Fibaro does such things that it just randomly disconnects "can't see" various sensors and periodically once every 3 months or so it makes the whole zigbee network invisible! That's my point, with HUE I have never had a situation where the lights were unavailable, or the response to switch on or off was delayed! Yes I prefer to use zwave stuff, I have over 100 of them on the net. It's quite a money suck. It's just that some things just aren't available in zwave! And I chose the Fibaro gateway because it can do both protocols! Interestingly, my colleague who has HOME assistant has no such problems. I think it's a great shame when a protocol that has been in beta mode for a few years isn't finished. So my criticism is not that some devices don't work ( I understand that ) , but that the network is unstable and that it fatally collapses! She's not fun to set everything up again. I think this is constructive criticism and I think it is worth thinking about ! The business model of selling a device with a feature and it not working for years seems pretty bad to me. I hope you understood my constructive criticism. Thank you

 

 

1 hour ago, Carsten6000 said:

Has anyone had trouble getting Hue into HC3?

 

I had it working for a period and now I´m not able to make it work. Any thoughts?

 

The settings in advanced seem to have disappeared.

 

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Please login or register to see this attachment.

yes i have the same problem, it's a gateway update, on the previous version it goes, the update doesn't allow the settings. 

Edited December 15, 2024 by petro_cz

[petro_cz 31]

1 hour ago, Carsten6000 said:

Has anyone had trouble getting Hue into HC3?

 

I had it working for a period and now I´m not able to make it work. Any thoughts?

 

The settings in advanced seem to have disappeared.

 

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Please login or register to see this attachment.

 

Old and new FW.

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Please login or register to see this attachment.

[Sankotronic 2,370]

6 hours ago, petro_cz said:

Hey, maybe you don't understand me! But my point is that fibaro excludes all zigbee devices once in a while! So I'm not dealing with compatibility, I understand that you can't serve everything with one gateway, but I'm concerned about the stability of the network and the already connected devices, Fibaro does such things that it just randomly disconnects "can't see" various sensors and periodically once every 3 months or so it makes the whole zigbee network invisible!

 

Hi @petro_cz ,

 

I do understand that Fibaro ZigBee is still unstable and tend to loose connection to the devices. I guess that is why is still BETA. I believe that they are busy with solving this problem. I just hope that they will also add ability for users to select ZigBee channel on HC3 as other ZigBee hubs have.

I read somewhere here that ZigBee on HC3 changes channel after some reboot or update and then all devices loose connection? Does this happened to you?

 

I remember that I had to change ZigBee channel on my HUE hub when I already had dozen of bulbs included. After changing channel I didn't loose those included bulbs so I guess that there is something that needs to be communicated between hub and devices when channel is changed.

I guess that it is just more complicated to solve this problem on the hub that needs to be compatible with all kind of devices from different manufacturers and that is why it takes so long to get HC3 ZigBee out of beta.

 

Regarding HUE bulbs and HC3 ZigBee, I can try to play with one bulb to see the difference, but I guess that HC3 can't do with these bulbs what HUE hub can do (dynamic HUE color scenes and effects) ?

[Neo Andersson 230]

We dont use Zigbee at all..After lot of problems...But there is one brand, that we found pretty reliable working. It is Gledopto. Its working in Fibaro. You have all the possibilities. Dimming, Coloring etc..It works, though the connection lost problems have occoured with them too once in a while.

 

[AU_Squirrel 1]

I have the same issue were all my zigbee devices on my HC3 just go offline after 2 - 3 weeks or so. The only way I found to get them back was to reload my last backup. A reboot doesn't fix the problem however the restore from backup does for some reason.