"nRF Connect SDK/ZBOSS" and "nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee/ZBOSS" updates?

RE: "nRF Connect SDK/ZBOSS" and "nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee/ZBOSS" updates?

Marjeris Romero — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 09:24:37 GMT

Hi,

What version of the nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee are you using for the existing devices?

[quote user="TKR"]1 - The coordinator will accept EP joins regardless of commissioning status. It looks as if this might have been addressed in the ZOI-522 in the NCS. We need the ability to ask our EPs to leave the network in order to have it join another coordinator as needed during deployment. Note that we can ask the EPs to leave and they do so, but immediately join back into the coordinator as an authenticated device outside of the commissioning being enabled.[/quote]

nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee v4.0.0 already supports the 'zdo mgmt_leave' command and response, so this sounds strange. Could you send a sniffer trace when this happens? You should double check that you are not starting network steering in the code on the coordinator side after sending the leave message. In the sniffer trace you should look for the field "Association Permit" in the coordinator, if it's set to True the end device will join again after leaving, if it is not set to 'false' look through your code and see if you are starting network steering somewhere in your code.

[quote user="TKR"]2 - big problems with more than a few reporting items. This looks to have been addressed in ZOI-111 in the NCS. It seems like some significant stability was added between 3.2 and 3.6 of the ZBOSS stack in reviewing the release notes. This is not a show stopper as we have reduced the number where there are not any problems at the moment.[/quote]

The ZBOSS stack had a limitation on the number of active reporting configurations to 10 entries. This is only a problem when you want to subscribe to attributes on a multi-endpoint device. There is a workaround for nRF5 SDK. You can change the size of the reporting table inside the endpoint declaration. Take a look at the answer in this devzone thread. The bugfix ZOI-111 in the release notes for ZBOSS v3.6 relates to this issue who was first in this ticket.

[quote user="TKR"]3 - We need the ability to stop the commissioning process as soon as we know our EPs have joined the network (reducing the minimum 180 second timeframe). In testing this multiple ways to restart commissioning with a smaller timeout, it still continues for the 180 seconds minimum.[/quote]

The 180 seconds permit duration is precompiled in the ZBOSS stack, and it is not possible to change this value without recompiling the entire stack, which you can only do if you are a member of the ZBOSS Open Initiative. The 180 seconds are used as default in the network steering procedure (started by calling bdb_start_top_level_commissioning(ZB_BDB_NETWORK_STEERING)) as it's specified in the Zigbee specification. However, you could also use zb_zdo_mgmt_permit_joining_req() directly to send a mgmt permit joining request directly to a remote device, see this post for more information.

[quote user="TKR"]We may have to move our development now over to the NCS for the coordinator, but now this means we are active in two SDKs which is not the best plan moving forward.[/quote]

We recommend developing new devices on NCS, but as I wrote in my previous answer the nRF5 SDK will still be supported for a long time (including Devzone support) so developing in nRF5 SDK is still a viable solution if you for example, don't need an RTOS or don't require newer features on Zigbee 3.0 that may come. There shouldn't be any problems using different SDK for different devices for a while either. Having a zigbee coordinator based on the nRF Connect SDK and your end devices based on nRF5 SDK should be fine.

Best regards,

Marjeris

RE: "nRF Connect SDK/ZBOSS" and "nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee/ZBOSS" updates?

TKR — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 18:18:56 GMT

Hi Marjeris,

Sorry for the late response as I was travelling.

Darn, we were hoping they would stay in sync. We have two products (ZigBee HA - EPs) released that use the older SDK and were building up a new device (Coordinator) enabled with ZigBee HA to communicate with these EPs. The primary problems we are facing affecting release are:

1 - The coordinator will accept EP joins regardless of commissioning status. It looks as if this might have been addressed in the ZOI-522 in the NCS. We need the ability to ask our EPs to leave the network in order to have it join another coordinator as needed during deployment. Note that we can ask the EPs to leave and they do so, but immediately join back into the coordinator as an authenticated device outside of the commissioning being enabled.

2 - big problems with more than a few reporting items. This looks to have been addressed in ZOI-111 in the NCS. It seems like some significant stability was added between 3.2 and 3.6 of the ZBOSS stack in reviewing the release notes. This is not a show stopper as we have reduced the number where there are not any problems at the moment.

3 - We need the ability to stop the commissioning process as soon as we know our EPs have joined the network (reducing the minimum 180 second timeframe). In testing this multiple ways to restart commissioning with a smaller timeout, it still continues for the 180 seconds minimum.

We may have to move our development now over to the NCS for the coordinator, but now this means we are active in two SDKs which is not the best plan moving forward.

So there are no plans to keep the nRF5 up to date? We were pretty deep into the new product release until we ran into this and unfortunately, we cannot release until the items above are solved, so we either fork the code and move over to NCS or ??? - seems like bug fixes in the old SDK would be not well supported and probably take a very long time.

RE: "nRF Connect SDK/ZBOSS" and "nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee/ZBOSS" updates?

Marjeris Romero — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 11:52:54 GMT

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. Active developement for Zigbee is only supported for the nRF Connect SDK. While the nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee is on 'maintenaince mode', so only minor bugfixes can be expected in the future.

Was there something in particular from ZBOSS v3.6 (used in NCS) you are missing in ZBOSS v3.2 (used in nRF5 SDK)?

ZBOSS documentation and release notes for nRF Connect SDK can be found on this page: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/zboss/index.html