[SOLVED] I’ll apologise for my ignorance now, ok?
I have had HA running for a little while.
I’m not a coder but I fumble my way through and have some simple automations.
I want to try Zigbee so I have bought a ConBee II.
I have plugged it into the RPi via a 1m USB extender cable.
The Integrations page of HA recognised the ConBee II without me doing anything (yay!).
I clicked ‘OPEN LINK’ and got asked to login to HA again.
I’m already logged in but…ok…I’ll do it again.
Then I got this
I clicked ‘ok’ (although ‘yes’ would have been a more emphatic answer) and got this
I had absolutely no idea what to enter here but eventually found a post on here which suggested this (though how anyone is supposed to know this beats me)
HA seemed happy enough with that and gave me this
Wow…I thought “what does that mean?”…no idea, I replied.
The only option was to click “SUBMIT” and got this
Very interesting - I didn’t even know I was looking for an API key
Where it says “Go to deCONZ Settings → Gateway → Advanced”…where do I find that?
I’m sure HA is great if you can interpret the gaps in these processes but for mere humans it is incredibly difficult at times.
Do I even need deCONZ to add a Zigbee sensor? I am beginning to suspect not.
Please, people, relieve me of my pain and give me some suggestions… thanks
EDIT: but, before you do that - read more about my adventure below…(man, I hope someone else finds this helpful)
Hopefully, this will help and not confuse you further.
Add-ons are separate applications (running in docker), that are partly, or wholly, configured to work with HA out of the box.
Integrations are loaded into HA and configured to speak to various things, including add-ons, hardware, external devices and systems etc. to get data in/out of ha.
There are three main ways for ha to work with zigbee
ZHA, is internal to HA and the integration will work directly with a usb stick (including the Conbee II)
zigbee2mqtt, is a separate application, which requires another separate application (an mqtt-broker, mosqqito is regularly used) to talk to HA. There are add-ins for both applications, or they can be installed totally independently. The z2mqtt app can use a variety of usb sticks., like zha.
deconz - created by the company that make the Conbee and only uses their zigbee controllers. Is available as an add-on or can be installed separately.
People have long discussions about the pros and cons. I currently use deconz and get the feeling that it’s getting left behind the others a bit now. They seem to be quicker to support new devices etc. I’m trying to decide which to move to.
Anyhow, if I was starting out today, I’d try zha first as it’s the most official. Then, if there was something I couldn’t do, id look to using zigbee2mqtt.
I’d aim to make that choice early on, as migration is probably a pain.
@eggman
Thank you for your response. I think I understand what you said.
I guess that, where I asked,
The answer is ‘no’.
Interestingly, when I logged on to HA this morning:
deCONZ had gone
the battery entity in my Aqara door sensor was available (it was unavailable yesterday)
So my current situation is that my first (and only) Zigbee door sensor switches on a lamp when it opens and switches the lamp off when it closes. This is what the automations are supposed to do so I am very relieved and can move on to the next challenge.
Thanks again
Rix
Glad it’s starting to work - slightly worrying that deconz ‘disappeared’. I would check in
Settings => Devices & Services to see what integrations you are running.
I suspect you may still have deconz (if you previously installed it), you may also have ZHA which might have auto installed.
You should be able to click on the devices and entities links of either/both to check what’s actually configured. If there is nothing configured under deconz, remove the integration and then make sure the add-on is removed as well.
Settings => Devices & Services to see what integrations you are running.
The deCONZ integration has definitely gone.
When I scroll back thorugh ‘Logbook’ there are two entries:
15:15:43 update.deconz_update off
16:23:46 update.deconz_update unavailable
When I look in /config/home-assistant.log.1
there are 19 references to ‘deconz’ on 27/10/22 (yesterday) but nothing today.
Similarly no reference to ‘deconz’’ in /config/home-assistant.log
which seems to have been created today 2022-10-28 10:29:22
