[Help] Nimly Lock with Zigbee and the deCONZ addon

[u/Ok_Preference4898]

Greetings good people! Sorry for the long post, I'm really hoping I can get some help with this one. Not sure if r/homeassistant is the right place, but I might crosspost to some other places. Here goes.

I recently decided to replace my Conbee II with an SLZB-06 for my ZHA integration. That turned out to be way more complicated and more work than I thought it would be... Anyway I eventually managed to wipe my existing network and restart the whole thing re-pairing all my devices. At this point I was very happy that everything was working perfectly fine, until I noticed one device that did not. I was unable to send commands to my Nimly Touch Pro lock. I received state changes when I manually locked the door, but commands failed with an error saying something about no route to the device.

A bunch of research - and failed attempts at getting my lock working - seems to show that I was unable to get the SLZB-06 to properly establish a route to the Nimly lock. Apparently locks are a bit weird in the Zigbee world. I tried Zigbee2MQTT too, which ended up having the opposite issue. The command went through and the lock did physically respond after some time, but it seems that the response to the command did not come back through the network, so the state did not update.

Just as a side note: I did try reducing the network to the simplest topography possible. Even with all routers powered off and the coordinator being literally the closest device with only a couple meters uninterrupted air between them it did not work. So I don't think signal strength or topography shenanigans had anything to do with it.

At this point I figured I'd have to bite the bullet and keep using my Conbee II just for the lock. I wanted to keep my primary network on ZHA with the SLZB-06, so I figured I'd try setting up the Conbee with Z2M. Unfortunately, I was not able to get that working. I decided to try the deCONZ addon. Finally I was able to control the lock again with these actions available in the deCONZ interface:

However... The lock was not exposed to Home Assistant. After some more research I figured out I needed to edit the DDF as that was set to "Draft" with no other settings applied. I made a minimal edit that looks like this:

And the lock finally showed up in Home Assistant, but missing most of its entities and no actions available.

So, can I get this working without having to manually map every single Zigbee command and state? Anyone else got this working with a Nimly lock?

TLDR: Cannot get the Nimly Lock to work with ZHA and the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 as coordinator. Attempts at getting it to work with the old Conbee II and alternative means (Zigbee2MQTT or deCONZ) have thus far been unsuccesful.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[u/jerobins]

Nimly appears supported by zigbee2mqtt. If the commands aren't getting there, need to look harder at the zigbee setup. USB extension cable? Zigbee channel out of the way of wifi? Etc.

[u/Ok_Preference4898 → u/jerobins]

Yes, it should be supported by Z2M itself. It is also supported in ZHA with this quirk. In fact, it worked well with the Conbee II until i decided to change radio. The SLZB-06 is connected over tcp and works perfectly with all other devices. I have also coordinated the channel selection with my wifi (although my Unifi gear is set to automatically optimize channel, so that may change).

One thing I forgot to mention was that when I did try Z2M with the Conbee II the issue was that the device was simply not discovered when joining was set to allowed. There was nothing in the logs. I may have to take another shot at Conbee II + Z2M combo since it may have been another factor in play there. It would certainly be better if that just works instead of trying to wrangle deCONZ into working.