GCFFlasher 4

April 3, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

GCFFlasher is the tool to program the firmware of dresden elektronik Zigbee products.

Supported Hardware

  • ConBee I
  • ConBee II
  • ConBee III
  • RaspBee I
  • RaspBee II
  • Hive
  • FLS-M

Supported platforms

The sources are POSIX compliant with a small platform specific layer, to make porting to different platforms easy.

  • GNU/Linux (arm, aarch64 and amd64; mips and risc should work too but aren't tested)
  • FreeBSD
  • Windows
  • macOS

Notes

  • To use the sniffer mode on ConBee I and ConBee II the ZShark sniffer firmware needs to be installed. It can be downloaded at https://deconz.dresden-elektronik.de/deconz-firmware
  • On macOS the -d parameter is /dev/cu.usbmodemDE... where ... is the serialnumber.

Building on Linux

Dependencies

The executable can be compiled without any dependencies, but it is recommended to install libgpiod to support RaspBee I, RaspBee II and ConBee I.

  • A C99 compiler like GCC or Clang
  • Linux kernel version 4.8
  • CMake
  • pkg-config
  • libgpiod

The executable doesn't link directly to libgpiod and will check at runtime if it is available via dlopen().

On Debian based distributions the build dependencies are installed by:

apt install pkg-config build-essential libgpiod-dev cmake make

Build

  1. Checkout this repository

  2. Navigate to the source directory, e.g. cd gcfflasher

  3. Compile the executable with CMake

cmake -B build .
cmake --build build

The executable is build/GCFFlasher4

  1. (optional) create a .deb package
cd build
cpack -G DEB .

Building on Windows

Dependencies

Visual Studio with MSVC C++ compiler needs to be installed. Tested with VS 2022 but older versions should work fine as well. The executable has no external dependencies.

Build

  1. Checkout this repository

  2. Open "x86 Native Tools Command Promt for VS 2022" via Windows Start Menu

  3. Navigate to the source directory, e.g. cd C:\gcfflasher

  4. Compile the executable with CMake

cmake -B build .
cmake --build build --config Release

The executable is build\Release\GCFFlasher4.exe.

Building on macOS

Dependencies

The executable can be compiled without any dependencies for ConBee II. To support ConBee I the library libftdi needs to be installed.

  • A C99 compiler like GCC or Clang
  • CMake
  • (optional) the libftdi development package for ConBee I can be installed via brew install libftdi using Homebrew.

Build

  1. Checkout this repository

  2. Navigate to the source directory, e.g. cd gcfflasher

  3. Compile the executable with CMake

cmake -B build .
cmake --build build

The executable is build/GCFFlasher

Run

$ ./GCFFlasher
GCFFlasher 4.8.0 copyright dresden elektronik ingenieurtechnik gmbh
usage: GCFFlasher <options>
options:
 -r              force device reboot without programming
 -f <firmware>   flash firmware file
 -d <device>     device number or path to use, e.g. 0, /dev/ttyUSB0 or RaspBee
 -s <channel>    enable sniffer on Zigbee channel (requires sniffer firmware)
                 the Wireshark sniffer traffic is send to UDP port 17754
 -H <host>       send sniffer traffic to Wireshark running on host
                 default is 172.0.0.1 (localhost)
 -c              connect and debug serial protocol
 -t <timeout>    retry until timeout (seconds) is reached
 -l              list devices
 -x <loglevel>   debug log level 0, 1, 3
 -i              interactive mode for debugging
 -h -?           print this help

Building on FreeBSD

Build

  1. Checkout this repository

  2. Navigate to the source directory, e.g. cd gcfflasher

  3. Compile the executable with the build script (with Clang)

cmake -B build .
cmake --build build

The executable is build/GCFFlasher4

Note: The serial USB device for a ConBee II is /dev/cuaU0.

Differences to previous GCFFlasher version 3.17

  • Open sourced under BSD-3-Clause License
  • Doesn't require root privileges on Raspberry Pi
  • Rewritten in C instead C++
  • Smaller binary, with 25 Kb vs. previously 250 Kb + Qt libraries on Raspberry Pi
  • No Qt, libWiringPi and libft2xx (FTDI) dependencies
  • Easier to port to different platforms
  • Suitable for headless systems and standalone setup which don't use deCONZ