ct-Open-Source/ct-Smart-Home

ZigBee devices not visible in node-red, but available in ZigBee dashboard

Vermatic opened this issue · 4 comments

Vermatic commented

I recently started to switch from a home-grown node-red/Zigbee2MQTT/MQTT setup on my Raspberry Pi 3 to the c't-Smart-Home project.

In the process of setting everything up again I noticed that I could not set up access to ZigBee in node-red correctly.

So I started with a fresh installation of the c't-Smart-Home to produce a minimal working example to check if I did something wrong, but it seems that it is simply not working.

Here are the steps that reproduce the problem for me:

  • git clone a fresh copy of the c't-Smart-Home project
  • start up the with the default installation - make sure the ZigBee USB stick is attached so that the ZigBee2MQTT image is correctly started as well
  • in my case go to http://raspberrypi.fritz.box:1881 and use the interface to pair one device, for example an Osram plug:
    image
  • now in node-red build the following minimal test setup
    image
  • the configuration node seems to be setup ok and there is communication:
    image
  • but no matter what I do, the "Refresh Device List" option does not work and the device list is never populated:
    image

There seems to be some communication (as can be seen on the right side), but I cannot see anything obviously wrong.
I will attach the logs of the 3 running containers as well.

Has anyone experienced the same problem and knows what is going on here?

Vermatic commented

When I manually press the on/off button on the power plug then I can see status messages in the "upper" node, so that means communication between ZigBee2MQTT -> MQTT -> node-red is basically working:
image
However, as I said, fetching the device list does not work so I cannot configure and populate the "lower" node...

Vermatic commented

Please check out andreypopov/node-red-contrib-zigbee2mqtt#53

The "problem" can be fixed by tweaking configuration.yaml.

After my installation from scratch the "legacy_api" setting was set to false, making node-red-contrib-zigbee2mqtt fail. Setting it to "true" fixed the problem.

Vermatic commented

I can confirm that ct-Smart-Home did not create the incorrect "legacy_api" setting. It is configurable from the ZigBee dashboard, however I do not remember setting it there.

It remains a mystery how it got there for me. For others it may be present if an older configuration is copied.