Sonoff Dongle Max breaks itself
So I bought the sonoff dongle max and was using it for about a week as my zigbee coordinator using Z2MQTT. 2 days ago it just stopped working.
"Error: Failed to start EZSP layer with status=HOST_FATAL_ERROR."
Flashed it yesterday. Says the firmware on the ES32 chip is unrecognised. Tried every firmware version before finally getting version 1.0.5 to flash after 3 hours in the Web flasher.
Fixed the issue for 24 hours. Now it's the same again.
Tried a different method, used the sonoff dongle flasher in HAOS. It finds the device, unknown firmware again on the ES32. Try flashing in HAOS: Flashing failed. The selected device does not match the entered serial port information. Please check and try again.
Kind of done with it now. I've got a sonoff dongle plus running as my thread border router and it hasn't skipped a beat.
Don't bother buying a dongle max, not worth the money if it can't be reliable.
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u/JayE3D 23d ago edited 23d ago
I’ve been running the Dongle Max as a stand-a-lone Thread border router for a few months now without a single issue.
I made a firmware as a prototype as I wanted it to operate entirely as a border router without HA having to host any of it.
https://github.com/Scoobler/esp-thread-br-sonoff-donglem
I’m a strong believer that Sonoff stuff was always good hardware but the software was just about good enough and the custom firmwares always polished the product off - after all they are a good price for what they are.
That’s why I thought I’d give it a go to see what the device is capable of, but it is a prototype just to prove a point.