Join Non-NRF Network?

[JVKran]

Hi there!

I wanted to do a little side project that's something completely different than BLE Mesh (which I do for work). I decided Zigbee would be fun. Even more so because I'm running Home Assistant with ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) and the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge. Now, I know this is not neccesarily something usefull to know, but I was wondering wether or not it would be possible to create a multisensor (for example the freertos-multisensor example) that's able to connect to the network.

I poked around a bit and got the example running in 'no-time'. Then I tried to pair it. They're both (ZHA and the nRF52840) set at channel 15, so that should be fine. Unfortunately, it wasn't. I got a lot of ``` Network steering was not successful (status: -1)``` messages. Then I tried to pair it using the IEEE code. Unfortunatly that didn't work out either (the same message occured). Then I thought it might had to do something with the Install-Code (since that was another option to provide). I couldn't find that code anywhere though.

But is this even possible? Or does the bridge have to run ZBOSS too?

Kind regards,

Jochem

[Øyvind]

Hi Joachem, 

What version of the nRF SDK for Zigbee and Thread are  you using in you project?

Network steering was not successful means that the device was unable to join a network, given with a generic error code -1.

Kind regards,
Øyvind

[Øyvind]

does the bridge have to run ZBOSS too?

No, it should not have to as long as your Zigbee stack follows the Zigbee spec and can connect with any general Zigbee device.

 

I'm running Home Assistant with ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation)

I'm sorry, being new to the world of Zigbee I was not aware about the incompatibility between Zigbee 3.0 and Zigbee Home Automation. Zigbee HA uses its own Zigbee stack called zigpy, and in order to connect to their network our device must support and be compatible with zigpy. There is some more information about this on Home Assistant's page about Zigbee here, where they also list Zigbee radio modules that are compatible with zigpy, and ZBOSS is not listed there. 

There is also a discussion here about a zigpy radio library for ZBOSS, but I do not think they have a solution yet. 

I've asked our Zigbee team what the status is on this, and will get back to you when I get an answer.

Kind regards,
Øyvind

[JVKran]

Hi Øyvind,

I was able to do some more testing and found out that the light_bulb example works perfectly fine once I comment the following lines.

zb_set_network_router_role(IEEE_CHANNEL_MASK);
zb_set_max_children(MAX_CHILDREN);

It then succeeds to connect without any kind of problems. However, commenting the line underneath in the experimental freertos multisensor example, doesn't result in a succesful pairing.

zb_set_network_ed_role(IEEE_CHANNEL_MASK);

What would be a logical reason behind this?

Kind regards,

Jochem