I have most of my basic setup on Home Assistant done after moving from OpenHab. This has taken some getting used to, but HA is so much better.
One thing I’d really, really like some advice on…
I have lots of Xiaomi stuff (20 motion sensors, 25+ door sensors, 20 switches and I also have 15 Yeelights).
At the moment I am using the Xiaomi binding. Generally it’s okay, but I do often have issues on restarts with gateways not connecting. I have a large ish house area, so I’d need to Zigbee repeaters if I go down that route, but I’d like some advice on whether to change from the Xiaomi official component, or whether I should go down a Zigbee2MQTT route or DeConz seems another options.
Have you tried Xiaomi originally and moved away from it? Does deconz support automations and all the features of Xiaomi? I imagine I am going to have to keep Xiaomi for the door lock that I dont think deconz will be able to support - but I want to move away for the rest of it. Do you use Zigbee extenders too?
… just looked, rather than a standalone repeater, do you use smart wall plugs? The Ikea ones are great priced, but cant work out from the error report if they actually work with deconz or not
I moved from Xiaomi to Deconz and have had a good experience with it.
I have a few 7 Ikea Bulbs and 2 Ikea Outlets which all act as repeaters, I would buy outlets over receivers, a lot more useful (unless you have a use for an always on USB plug of course) . The rest is made up of Xiaomi door sensors, motion sensors, wall switches and buttons. All work well.
My only gripe is that sometimes I find pairing the wall switches (mains powered - no neutral - double button ones) a bit difficult, but once it’s done, I have had no problems.
I started with the xiaomi hub, wich worked ok-ish, then I moved to homey (https://www.athom.com/en/)
worked flawless but there was a high cpu issue so i though i’d make it easier for homey and move to a dedicated device…
tried Zigbee2MQTT, worked ok for everything but my Aquara door sensors, after some time they would not register the first “on” only the second one and that would trigger 2 "on"s…
thats not really workable for door sensors so I went to deCONZ…
I found the integration a bit lacking also some of my INNR SP120 plug would disappear…
Now I’m back with homey, removed all non-essential apps and i’m using it to publish the sensor data to MQTT, works actually pretty well…
looking back I at one point switched from zwave to zigbee, that was a mistake, it seems there are not as many options (for me) with zigbee, cheaper? yes but limited options…
i got a conbee device after wanting to declutter my house of hue hub, xiaomi hub etc… went with deconz and havent looked back… in fact I actually find that the deconz setup works better than my hue hub for lights…
I’ve not used zigbee2mqtt, I’ve certainly not used the xiaomi integration as I have a right old mix of devices from different suppliers.
I can say, that with the mix, I find deconz and the integration general very stable and very quick. However, once every three months or so, it seems to decide to stop speaking to one or more battery devices and I have to fiddle about a bit to get them recognised again (removing batteries, and in extreme cases repairing).
I’m back!
So, I took the plunge and went with Deconz as suggested. Got it all up and running, even along with Zwave. Managed to add the IKEA Smart Plugs to act as range extenders, and then sucessfully added two motion sensors. I thought I had it cracked and was ready to move all sensors over… then an issue. They aren’t getting updated. One of the sensors thats right by the Conbee isnt updating at all pretty much. Motion triggers lights to turn on and off so I need almost instant polling like I had with Xiaomi.
I dont know if it makes a difference, but I am also getting this error repeated: 19-10-19 17:39:32 WARNING (MainThread) [hassio.api.security] No API token provided for /api/config
I assume though that as the devices are picked up in HA it isnt the main issue?
