deCONZ/Conbee II stick on separate Raspberry Pi

Hardware
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#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!

Migrate from hyper-v
#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.

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#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.

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#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).

#8

Awesome work @Burningstone
I was not able to install the docker on my rasbian with the ConBee II USB-stick.
I upgraded and updated my raspbian before trying but it says:
“This Linux distribution (raspbian stretch) reached end-of-life and is no longer supported by this script.”
Is there some other newer docker I can install or should reinstall my Raspberry Pi with some other raspbian version?

#9

Which script are you talking about?

#10

@Burningstone Thank you for getting back to me.
I talk about the segment about:

Setup ZigBee Hub (ConBee II)
The commands for installing Docker and Docker-compose.

But I worked that one out, I needed a newer clean install of Raspberry Pi OS.

But then I got to a new problem:

Create docker-compose.yml file and directory deconz to store the config:
Create docker-compose.yml file:

Where should I create the directory to store docker-compsose.yml in?
Maybe I’m dumb here, but Linux isn’t my best subject so this was confusing for me.

#11

In the home directory of the user. You can also use subfolders etc…

E.g. I have this structure:

/home/burningstone/docker is the “base” directory and in this directory is the docker-compose.yml file and a subfolder deconz

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