deCONZ/Conbee II stick on separate Raspberry Pi

Hardware
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Tags: #<Tag:0x00007f325f5a14d0> #<Tag:0x00007f325f5a13b8> #<Tag:0x00007f325f5a1188>
#1

Currently I’m using some Sonoff Zigbee Bridges (with the Tasmota firmware) to connect to my Zigbee devices (bridges are using MQTT to connect to Homeassistant). I would like to use some Zigbee devices outdoors as well, and to cut a long story short: the Sonoff bridge is not a good match because the wifi and zigbee parts in the same case and I’d like to put a cable between them (so I can keep the wifi part indoors, but have the Zigbee antenna/module outdoors). Hope this diagram makes it clear:

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I’m reading good things about the Conbee II USB Gateway. So my question is: is it possible to have a Raspberry Pi + Conbee II gateway, integrated with my Homeassistant (which is running on another Raspberry Pi)? Can I use the deCONZ integration for that, or does that integration requires that the Conbee II gateway is plugged in directly in the Raspberry Pi that’s running Home Assistant?

Thanks!

#2

The Conbee stick / Phoscon software can be installed on any computer on your network. It does not have to be on your HA instance.

1 Like
#3

As Francis already says this works perfectly fine. I wrote a detailed guide how I did exactly that (conbee on a separate Pi) here in my repo.

2 Likes
#4

Cool, that seems to be very similar to what I’m doing!! Thanks for sharing!!
In your GitHub repo your write “The ZigBee stick communicates through a websocket connection”, is it the deCONZ integration that takes care of that? Or did you need to run something else (additional) on the Raspberry Pi that has the Conbee stick?

#5

Nothing additional needed, deconz handles this. Just wanted to point out in my docu how it communicates with Home Assistant.

#6

Soon Conbee stick would be usable with Zigbee2mqtt and you could run that and publish things back to your main Home Assistant using MQTT


#7

I read somewhere that this is already possible. However I still prefer deconz, mainly for the ability of smoothly dimming lights on a button press and stop dimming on release of a button, which ZHA and zigbee2mqtt can only do with workarounds (sending a service to increasw brightness every x ms).