BTicino/Legrand/Netatmo Zigbee devices refuse to connect to third-party gateways

Legrand and its child companies (such as BTicino with their Living Now series) manufacture Zigbee-based smart devices. While these devices use the Zigbee protocol, they are intentionally restricted to work only with Legrand’s own gateways.

[Incident]

During the pairing process, Legrand devices send a non-standard Zigbee command and expect a specific reply from the coordinator. If the expected response is not received, the device will refuse to complete the pairing process.This effectively blocks the use of Legrand devices with third-party Zigbee gateways such as Zigbee2MQTT, Home Assistant’s ZHA, or other open-source coordinators.

When a Legrand device is powered on and attempts to join a network, it sends a read frame to every device on the network. The payload includes the number of seconds since the device was powered.

If the coordinator responds with a valid value (e.g., 23 seconds), the device continues pairing.
If the response is missing or the value is too high (e.g., 200), the device leaves the network and refuses to pair.

This mechanism acts as a vendor lock-in, ensuring that only Legrand’s own gateways can provide the expected response.

Zigbee2MQTT Workaround

The Zigbee2MQTT project implevemented a workaround to support Legrand dices by simulating the expected response during pairing. Below is their current implementation:

// support Legrand security protocol
// when pairing, a powered device will send a read frame to every device on the network
// it expects at least one answer. The payload contains the number of seconds
// since when the device is powered. If the value is too high, it will leave & not pair
// 23 works, 200 doesn't
if (device.manufacturerID === Zcl.ManufacturerCode.LEGRAND_GROUP && !device.customReadResponse) {
    device.customReadResponse = (frame, endpoint) => {
        if (frame.isCluster("genBasic") && frame.payload.find((i: {attrId: number}) => i.attrId === 61440)) {
            const options = {manufacturerCode: Zcl.ManufacturerCode.LEGRAND_GROUP, disableDefaultResponse: true};
            const payload = {61440: {value: 23, type: 35}};

            endpoint.readResponse("genBasic", frame.header.transactionSequenceNumber, payload, options).catch((e) => {
                logger.warning(`Legrand security read response failed: ${e}`, NS);
            });

            return true;
        }

        return false;
    };
}

https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee-herdsman-converters/blob/master/src/index.ts#L638-L658

[Incident]

Zigbee2MQTT Workaround

References