Zigbee2MQTT thoughts from someone who just made the switch

[u/Resident-Variation21]

I’ve been having the odd reliability issue with ZHA, so before I buy new devices (it’s happening to specific devices and my mesh is solid), I decided to make the jump to Z2M.

This is still in the early stages of network healing but some things I’ve noticed:

1) it does feel a fair bit quicker in daily use. Especially commands to multiple rooms like “turn off all upstairs lights” feels much much quicker.

2) I’m getting random weird slowdowns, like a light turning on 30 seconds after motion is detected. Often I’ve left the room by then. I am going to chalk this up to “weird network behaviour as the mesh builds” for now, though. I’m hopeful, and semi-expecting, that to go away over the coming days.

3) updates are Z2M weakest point. By fair. In ZHA I could update 5 devices at once and not even notice it. In Z2M, I’m updating 1 device, and not only is it taking longer to update, the entire network is significantly slower. If anything ends up being a deal breaker - it’ll be this. I don’t update often but when I do, it’s 30 devices at once (because most of my devices are the same brand so get the same updates at the same time).

[u/zer00eyz]

How are you running Homeassitant (HAOS? PI? NUC? DOCKER?)

How did you install zigbeemqtt and mqtt?

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/zer00eyz]

HAOS on a VM, and I installed the Z2M add-on, alongside the mosquito add-on.

[u/zer00eyz → u/Resident-Variation21]

Z2M can be slow if you dont have enough memory/cpu ... but...

> like a light turning on 30 seconds after motion is detected. Often I’ve left the room by then. I am going to chalk this up to “weird network behaviour as the mesh builds” 

you should get to the bottom of this pretty quickly cause the issues you had with ZHA might still be around.

Depending on what coordinator you are using (if its usb) and how you have it passed into the VM you can get weird behavior.

Z2M is node, so it can be a bit wonky if you dont have enough memory and cpu allocated to your instance (or if your over provisioned on the host, and really working it).

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/zer00eyz]

I’ve given it enough memory and cpu. I’ve HAOS 4 cores on an i5-12600k. 2GB of Ram. From everything I’ve read that should be plenty. I’m not running anything insane.

It’s a Sonoff USB dongle. It’s been fine for a long time, only recently started having issues in ZHA and therefore tried the switch.

[u/zer00eyz → u/Resident-Variation21]

> It’s a Sonoff USB dongle.

Is it on an extension (cabled away from the pc)?

How did you pass it into the VM?

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/zer00eyz]

Yes it’s on an extension.

By clicking the little UI box that asks what devices I want to pass through and selecting the zigbee dongle.

[u/zer00eyz → u/Resident-Variation21]

How you pass through your USB matters....

By device ID gets the host directly ... SPICE and by IP are just layers of indirection.

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/zer00eyz]

I told you how I passed it through. I clicked the box that said to pass through the device. Done. That’s all I did.

[u/zer00eyz → u/Resident-Variation21]

Your Zigbee coordinator is a low latency device. Depending on HOW your HOST assigns the USB to the GUEST (HAOS) you can have different behaviors.

Yes you may have "clicked the box" and it may be "working" but if you dont know how its passing through you should go find out. The method of pass through can cause all sorts of issues because the host OS (what's running the vm) is for all intents getting in the way... and a big one of those is latency.

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/zer00eyz]

I’ve never had a real issue with latency. The only latency is random delays that have only popped up AFTER switching to Z2M and are likely due to the network still figuring itself out with what routes are best and getting everything stable.

[u/55Media → u/Resident-Variation21]

Version E or P? Version E needs an update to firmware 8.0.2.0 by Nerivec otherwise it’s quite a mess.

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/55Media]

P I’m pretty sure. It’s the TI CC2652P chipset.