I’m in the process of looking at moving my home automation over to Home Assistant.
I’ve had some success but it’s now got to the point where my next step would be to migrate all my Zigbee devices.
I currently have a selection of Ikea and Innr bulbs and Xioami buttons, door and temperature sensors that, after a bit of a struggle, I managed to get working with Zigbee2MQTT.
Looking at the hardware and software options for running Zigbee on HA I see that I can continue to use Zigbee2MQTT or the ZHA integration.
If I were to change to ZHA I would need to get a different Zigbee adaptor as I believe the one I have now, the LAUNCHXL-CC26X2R1, wouldn’t work with ZHA.
There is a bewildering amount of Zigbee sticks available as well as wireless hubs like the Sonoff bridge that can be installed with Tasmota.
I like the idea of the Sonoff bridge using ZHA as that means I don’t need to be concerned about where I physically install my HA server, or issues with the server interfering with the stick signal.
Basically there are so many options my head is spinning a bit. I know what is “best” is extremely subjective so I’m just asking what works, and didn’t work, for you.
If it makes any difference to the recommendations I am in the UK.
As the end devices and routers goes I use tuya and aquara sensors and routers.
I never had an issue with router, sometimes my end devices do disconnect but its easy to reconnect them. I use zigbee2mqtt. For light switches i found out that zigbee bseed touch switch works best for me. By that I mean I can easily mount them as they have aluminium bracket and they have great touch response. You barely touch them to go on/off.
You have to find for yourself what best suits your needs. It does require some experimentation but thats the way it is.
It would help to know what kind of HA installation you are running, and on which device.
For example, from this quote, it sounds like you already have a ZigBee network up and running on a (different? same?) device to where you want to run Home Assistant, and which communicates with an existing MQTT server.
If I’ve understood this correctly, then why not just run the MQTT integration in Home Assistant to connect to the MQTT server, and communicate with your existing ZigBee network that way, using your existing hardware.
It has the advantage that your ZigBee network should stay up even if Home Assistant fails for example.
I migrated from ZHA to z2m, so I would say stick with z2m if your otherwise happy with it.
I personally don’t like the idea of the wifi bridge. If you want network connectivity I would look at tubez wired ethernet devices.
If you go with ZHA, I’d probably lean toward an SI Labs EFR32MG21 based device. As the chipset included in the Yellow and upcoming HA branded dongle I have to think it will be the best supported ZHA (and HA Thread) device going forward.
For z2m the TI 2652 chips are the best supported IMO.
If you already have Z2M working, then why change it? Just install MQTT in HA and point to it from your Z2M installation. That way you will not need to change anything in you zigbee network
Or stay with you current MQTT broker, and connect to it. Still, not zigbee changes needed.
I use HA within a Hyper-V VM and the two issues I had was 1) Hyper-V does not support USB passthrough and 2) Even if I use another VM product my server lives in the basement and not ideal for my zigbee network.
I purchased the Zigbee Bridge to flash tasmota but when researching it was recommended that serial over wifi was not a good solution so I returned it and I ended up getting the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB stick instead, which looks to be the cheapest and offers great performance after updating the firmware. I setup Z2M on an old RasPi 1 which lives in a drawer on the main floor, this allows me to use my zigbee network via MQTT on multiple HA VMs and everything is hard wired.
I usually download a backup of my production HA and restore it for testing on another computer just to test updates or new integrations etc to make sure I’m not breaking anything or otherwise just messing around with new automations.