I'm in the process of moving from Smartthings and so far it's been a fair bit of work but this platform is much superior IMO. Right now I've got HA installed on an RPi, zigbee2mqtt installed on a Sonoff Max dongle and an old Eero pro6 as a thread border router in some outbuildings a long way from the house - It's taken a fair bit of sweat and tears to get to here but the (nearly) final step is to install ZHA on another Sonoff Max so I can migrate everything in my house.
My question is - What pitfalls are going to happen when I install this new zigbee network and how I can avoid them? Is the dongle going to be plug and play when connected via POE or should I be connected a USB cable to a PC before I expose it to the network? Thanks in advance.
Why are you installing ZHA if you've already got a Z2M mesh running? Is there a specific problem you're trying to solve?
FYI, you can run the Edge (development) version of Z2M as a separate instance. Don't let the name scare you off - it's quite stable. If the reason is that your other Z2M is in the outbuilding & the signal doesn't reach the house, than a separate instance of Z2M is the way I would go.
Yeah, the other buildings are 100m from the house, I assumed I couldn't run a separate instance of Z2M but that absolutely would be an option. It's there some guidance on this?
Go to Home Assistant > Settings > Apps > Install App and scroll down to the Zigbee2MQTT section. You should see an option to download the Edge version from there.
Do note the following warning, though. Might be safer to use the Edge version for your outbuilding & keep the mainstream Z2M version for your house for updates.
You don't need to run the Edge version to get multiple Z2M instances on the same HA installation. If you add the repo with and without / at the end of the URL you can run the same version.
Thanks both, everything is up and running. For once in my life I took the time to write down every step I needed to do and it fired up first time, who knew! Thanks again.
