question

OK further diagnostics reveal that from a cold start (zigbee to usb plugged in to ccgx and has solid active LED and Zigbee-rs485 wired in with rapid active LED flashing indicated it is un-paired.)

pushing the function button on the Zigbee-RS485 rapidly 3 times will pair to the USB, indicated by slow flashing of active light. Once paired with the USB it will re-pair when either is powered down and up.

It is possible to re-pair with a different zigbee to usb by pushing the function button 3 times in rapid succession on teh Zigbee to RS485 (The Rapid flashing active light goes to slow flashing when paired) we therefore conclude the Zigbee-usb is the master.

Hence the issue appears to lie with the CCGX usb to Zigbee-usb. When using the USB-rs485 cable there is an initial flashing of the cable lights followed by a pause before the steady communications flashing sequence starts, if this initialisation fails for any reason the CCGX doesn't appear to make any further attempts to establish communications unless the cable is unplugged and re-plugged in. There doesn't seem to be a way of getting the ccgx to re-search the usb ports (apart from rebooting)

I therefore suspect the initialisation sequence between the ccgx and zigbee-usb is failing.

Has anyone come acros this before?

silly me, even with the wifi saying it's connected in the ccgx wifi menu checking for updates in the firmware menu said it was up to date. There doesn't appear to be anywhere on the web that says what the latest version was so assuming the firmware was up to date we proceeded with trying to figure out why the usb rs485 cable worked but the zigbee usb wouldn't.

however moving the ccgx increased the wifi signal strength and all of a sudden updates were available. CCGX is now running 2.63 firmware and we're up and running.

so aside from having to pair the zigbees it does now work "out of the box"

Lessons learnt

rapid flashing of the zigbee-RS485 active LED bad! Slow flashing Good :-)

Zigbee-USB doesn't appear to do much when you plug it in except the active LED comes on solid it is possible to configure so no led's are lit by pushing and holding both buttons but pressing the reset button or unplugging restores order and the solid active LED. if you watch closely the tx/rx led will give a very brief flash but otherwise no activity indications untill the paired Zigbee-rs485 has slow flashing active LED then comes starts with TX/rx leds all happy.

The RS485 coms at the meter end is tricky to see, if you're lucky the meter has tx/rx leds if not then its check the wires and hope it works!

I'm off to site tomorrow to see if I can replicate the workshop learnings in the field

Thanks for that, I am currently camping out at the customers farm and now I am all exited to run 150m up the hill to my distribution board which now has both zigbees and the Cerbo inside it and press the button 3 times, where does it say that in the victron instructions, yep, nowhere, and where does it tell you the unpaired status lights, yep nowhere

Anyone can explain how the two push buttons operate?

I have been trying a few things that I read on the forum but my two devices (Victron packaging) refuse to talk now.

The worded for a day or so and then the data started to take longer and longer so of course I started to push the buttons and I have made it worse :(

Any simple instructions how to reset them?

USB unit has a solid LED on the activity and what it looks a very dimm tx/rx from time to time.

RS485 activity LED flashes every 3 seconds or so and from time to time there's RX/TX but GX says is disconnected.

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It's pretty old but I kept coming across it. So here is my configuration and connection how it works for me. DRT not purchased from Victron but directly from China