Zigbee WTF?

💬 Lounge
1

Posting this in the lounge, because I don't really expect any answers to what happened last night, but will throw it out there anyhow.

Of course this happens right after I armed the alarm and was ready to go to bed. All of a sudden, it's like my system had eaten some bad sushi and expelled it all over the zigbee network, tuning my house into an 80's disco, The led bars on many of my Inovelli 2-1 switches started turning on and off with random colors, and some of my hue downlights went to 100% while others flashed on and off. This went on for a few minutes.

I doubt it had anything to do with arming the alarm system, as that happened at 11;44 pm and there are no unusual log entries around that event. But a few minutes later, as I'm trying to figure out why some of my hue downlights are burning our retinas, I see this:

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What the hell? All of these are Hue bulbs or downlights, all connected to HE (I don't have a Hue hub). There are no rules, switches or anything else that command every last Hue device at the same time, and no automations that fire off at that time of night.

Wifi is on channels 1 and 6 and my UDM Pro-SE reports no interference for the past week:
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Every last light and fan switch (50+) in the house is an Inovelli 2-1 so I believe I have a solid mesh. How could I not; there are multiple mains-powered devices in literally every room. Hub is a C8-Pro using the supplied power adapter, zigbee on channel 20 at power level 8. The vast majority of devices in the house are new, zigbee 3.0 devices (50+ Inovellis, 10 Hue bulbs, 23 Hue downlight retrofits). Only a few battery- powered temp/humidity sensors, and a few plug-in switches and dimmers.

Things work correctly about 90% of the time, but there's always something that doesn't turn on or off or work as it should. Was the same on the C7, upgrading to C8-Pro didn't change anything. I am really regretting switching to zigbee for most of my devices in this house. In my old house, most everything was z-wave and everything was rock-solid.

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Do you have any Alexa devices in the house, and if you do have you turned off "Hunches?"

By "alarm system" do you mean HSM, or something else integrated w/HE?

So nothing to do w/differening Zigbee chips in the hubs, it would seem.

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Yes, she's in almost every room. Not sure about Hunches, will check, but I don't have too many HE devices exposed to Alexa, only the very few that we actually need/want to control via voice.

QolSys IQ4, integrated into HE using my drivers. I have a few RM rules that play notifications through Echo speaks when certain doors are left open, and HE mode changes depending on the alarm state (e.g. home, away, sleep). Those mode changes indirectly control lights, but those rules have been in place for quite a while.

In terms of reliability, probably not although I've never seen anything this bizarre happen on the C7.

4

also if you have alexa and you say turn off or on all lights.. hunches or not.. all hell breaks loose.

even you even say alexa turn off the light. and she asks which one.. and my wife being a smart ■■■ said all of them.. well you get the idea.

i dont have a lot exposed either but she finds some on your own like my hue lights and adds them.

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Def turn off Alexa hunches, even if it's not the root of this issue, as it's been repeatedly shown to cause problems w/lights turning on when not desired.

Ah - below confused me, sounded like you'd had this type of thing happen on your C7 as well.

You should post your logs for when your alarm system was turned on, just in case there is info there that might help w/troubleshooting.

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Don't think that can happen here. I don't have any Hue-related skill enabled, and there aren't any Hue bulbs are exposed through the HE skill. Indirectly there are a few, via HE group devices or RL activators, but only a handful, definitely not the whole house and not any of the ones that shot up to 100%. Nothing unexpected shows up as a device in the Alexa app on my phone.

7

General random unreliability on the C7 as well. A few times a week at least things would fail to turn on or off when they were supposed to, or the device in question was in a different state then HE thought it was in. Adding delays or metering between commands to zigbee devices and/or running a rule multiple times sometimes got things where they were supposed to be. Annoying, but not the end of the world. I was hoping the added CPU power, zigbee 3.0 radio and/or external antennas in the C8-Pro would help.

I've never seen anything this bizarre on the C7, but I certainly can't attribute it to the C8 though. It's as if someone fired a directed energy weapon which operates in the zigbee spectrum at my house.

Nothing to post, really. That's the first thing I checked and there was nothing even remotely unusual.

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If you.give alexa access to a hue.hub. the lights get added automatically. Even when u add a new one. Same.for.kasa she.finds all my switches.

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Tagging @bertabcd1234 to come play w/us. :slight_smile:

Some additional logging may help - maybe enable debug logging on at least some of the affected devices tonight before enabling your alarm, might help to gather some additional details. I don't have a lot of experience w/Hue bulbs directly connected, I have all mine on a Hue bridge.

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No doubt, but I don't even own a Hue hub.

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Perhaps, but I think this was one of those bizarre things that only happens once in a lifetime. I've never seen anything even remotely close to this behavior as what I saw last night. It's really like the zigbee network got attacked with a whole bunch of random crap, some of which may just have happened to end up as valid zigbee commands.

A directed energy weapon is my working theory right now.

I suppose some sort of bizarre signals through the AC power could have been the cause, but there was no evidence of a power surge nor any apparent damage to any electronics, etc.

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12

Hopefully yes, a bizarre on-off event. :slight_smile:

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The only times I have seen this happen were when I had a zigbee button controller not pair correctly to the hub and send group messages to every Zigbee device on the same channel. I believe the only device that you mentioned that could have accomplished this is one of your Inovelli dimmers. Personally, I have accomplished this feat multiple times with Lightify 4-button dimmers. This is always followed by groans throughout the house from my wife and kids and me apologizing for being an idiot.

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14

Just a side note -- but you might want to check the "location log" or event log for "Zigbee Down" & "Zigbee Up" messages.

This seems similar to the occasional "Zigbee Storms" I get -- relays clicking all over the place in outlets and switches, lights flashing on and off, and general chaos.

In my network, I'm pretty certain I have a "bad Zigbee" device, but I haven't nailed it down yet for sure.

S.

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15

You nailed it, don't know why I hadn't thought of that.

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I suppose it's possible I have a bad Zigbee device. I can get rid of the few Zigbee plug-in switches and dimmers and see if that stabilizes things. Mostly they're only used for the Christmas trees and decorations.

I'm giving serious thought to replacing the non-essential Zigbee stuff with equivalent z-wave switches. The only Zigbee switches I really need are those that are bound to Hue downlights. The ones that control dumb bulbs could be Z-Wave, they (Inovelli) just didn't have the z-wave version at the time I bought the blues.

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The deep sense of trepidation ( noun 1. A state of alarm or dread; apprehension. ) this sends through anyone doing anything in automation beyond lights and such!!!

If I want a chicken's head cut off I want to be the one to decide when...not some errant device playing a role in an unexpected door closure! And nevermind irrigation or freeze protections going buzzzerk when I'm away.

This is the kind of thing where I would pay extra for the Hub Intelligence required to recognize that:
"hey, I've noticed this device appears to be acting out of the norm, or otherwise misbehaving, and prone to cause havoc. As of now it's being IGNORED and I'm announcing that to you via a Notification so that you can look into it STAT!"

I don't know what the best list/collection of behaviors might be but I bet they could be discerned well enough to give a user a heads up without becoming a nuisance ....even if it's a matter of putting a device in an "exemption list" if said behavior is actually normal.

Now everybody go ahead and tell me "nah, can't be done....to many variables, too many nuances, too onerous, too much overhead".....yada yada yada.

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do you have any lan integrations? These seem to stress the Hubitat hubs. What does your free memory look like? If memory gets low, Zigbee is the first to crash and generally go wacky.
replace the IP with your IP address

http://192.168.0.94/hub/advanced/freeOSMemoryHistory

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Unfortunately, I think the the truth of the matter is that the HUB is not talking when the relays start clicking, so it doesn't see anything -- OR the messages are malformed in some way, and it knocks the radio off the air, and again, the hub doesn't "see" anything.

I suspect a Zigbee Sniffer (XBee) could possibly help out here, but I've not bothered to buy one, I don't really know why. Perhaps if I can't figure it out soon, I'll buy one and start figuring it out.

S.

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19

Ah, I see your point...radio storm is a radio storm. The more powerful the HE radio capabilities get...the more I wonder what limited sniffing or simply "here's a look at what I'm seeing from your device radios" capability might be possible and thereby helpful.

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That's not good. Do you have any bulbs other than the Hue bulbs?