Home Assistant not detecting my TR USB-C dongle

ismikes

I just bought a Third Reality USB-C dongle from Amazon and my Home Assistant OS Virtual Machine in Proxmox is not detecting it. I’ve passed the USB port through and Linux is seeing it as it creates /dev/ttyUSB0 as well as the /dev/serial/by-id/usb-1a86_USB_Serial-if00-port0 link to ../../ttyUSB0 and I see permissions of crw-rw—- root audio 188, 0 on the device. I think that looks right. I go to Settings -> Devices & services -> Add integration and choose Third Reality then Add Zigby device, then tell it to Proceed, serial device path /dev/ttyUSB0… it hangs for a while (trying to communicate with the device I assume) then comes back and asks me to “Pick your Zigbee adapter type” which I think means it didn’t work. ChatGPT tells me I should be telling it to pick “ConBee I/II” which lines up with the deCONS selection but that doesn’t work. None of them seem to help.

Do I have a firmware problem? Is something wrong with the device permissions?

Please help!

Siyo

ismikes
It is definitely a good chance to flash the firmware to the latest version (Coordinator-V21). If you do this later, you will need to re-pair all devices. Here is the link to the firmware and software you’re gonna need: https://github.com/thirdreality/ThirdReality-Zigbee-3.0-USB-dongle

When setting up this dongle, you should NOT select “Conbee”. Instead, select “ZiGate USB-TTL,” and you will have communication with this dongle.

ismikes

Siyo Ah, thanks! I will go try that.

ismikes

Wait, the ZiGate type got a response (I thought I had tried that already). It complained that “Adapter is not recommended” and “support for it may be removed in the future.” That sounds bad. So I then told it to “Set up automatically (recommended)”, it said “Forming a new Zigbee network” which took a while. Finally it responded “Could not form a new Zigbee network. Error: too many values to unpack (expected 1, got 4)” and all I have is a close button.

Is this a Flash the Firmware situation?

Siyo

ismikes
That sounds like a strange issue. Maybe restart the HA? Please also check the permissions of this dongle for HA and ensure it has the right privileges. I suspect that HA has configured the dongle before and is still occupying the serial port, causing the issue.
For Zigate, the dongle is just using the protocal, so not a big deal so far.

ismikes

Okay, flashing the firmware fixed that problem. I’m a little spooked by the fact that the Home Assistant folks don’t approve of ZiGate though. Is there a firmware update that can change the protocol to something that has brighter prospects?

ismikes

Just to follow up, flashing the firmware worked and the coordinator device was added. Home Assistant is now in control of that and the gen3 outlet I bought at the same time. The reason I got the outlet was not for on/off control but for energy consumption monitoring of the NAS I recently added.

That’s it, thanks for the help. :-)

Siyo

ismikes
That is wonderful, hope you enjoy life with HomeAssistant. We will check whether the dongle’s protocol can be updated with the engineering team.