Error while starting zigbee-shepherd

General support
1

Hi all,
first of all I would like to say that it is really good to have this forum for support, was missing that in the past. And of course also great to have the zigbee2mqtt as an alternative option for setting up a zigbee network with devices from several vendors, really love using it.
My setup has been quite stable for several months, but recently thinks became a little unstable and I’m not really sure what is happening.
I made sure i’m on the latest version of zigbee2mqtt by running the update script and also I flashed my sticks to the latest 20190223 firmware.
When I now try to start the zigbee2mqtt service I get the following errors in my logfile:

3/23/2019, 8:11:11 AM - info: Starting zigbee2mqtt version 1.2.1 (commit #e5ca977)
3/23/2019, 8:11:11 AM - info: Starting zigbee-shepherd
3/23/2019, 8:11:12 AM - info: Error while starting zigbee-shepherd, attempting to fix… (takes 60 seconds)

And this keeps on repeating.
Sometimes I only get 1 of these errors and then afterwards the service starts (apparently the attempted fix did fix it), but then the network is not really functioning well. Few of my devices seem unreachable and don’t report their status.
In total I have around 50 devices connected, half of that are ikea tradfri lights, spread around the house to make a good ‘router backbone’, and the other half of the devices are xiaomi sensors (temp/hum/baro, motion/lux and doorsensors).
Does anyone know how to debug or fix this issue ? Help would be greatly appeciated since currently my setup is non-functional :frowning:
Regards,
Herman

2

hello

once I had that issue and then upgrade my node.js

JLG

3

As you are having quite a big network, I would recommend using the new max stability firmware: https://github.com/Koenkk/Z-Stack-firmware/tree/dev/coordinator

4

Hi Koen,
wasn’t aware of the different choices of firmware’s, will give the max stability firmware a try.
In the meantime i’ve transferred the zigbee2mqtt from my rpi to my generic ubuntu server (intel based machine) and with that also the above mentioned error has gone luckily.
I hope flashing the other firmware will also fix the other issue that some of the devices sometimes drop from the network.
@Koenkk: you mention the max stability firmware supports 5 directly connected devices to the coordinator, does it automatically select some nearby routers for this ? or should I use a specific sequence in pairing my devices ? e.g. first pair 5 routers with good reach to the coordinator and only then pair all the other routers and endpoints ?
regards,
Herman

5

You dont need to re-pair your devices, I’m not sure what would happen, best way to find out is to try.