Do I even need a zigbee radio?

1

I have mostly Insteon and Zwave devices. When I ordered a few Xiaomi sensors I didn’t realize they required a Xiaomi gateway and thought I could control them with a Zigbee radio and the zha component.

During my searches, I discovered zigbee2mqtt which requires a CC2531 usb radio which needs to be custom flashed. I’m assuming this is compatible with the zha component, please correct me if I’m wrong. This looks like this takes a bit of work to setup. Yes, buy one, but even so you still have to setup zigbee2mqtt, etc.

Now I completely understand the advantages of using zigbee2mqtt and not relying on the gateway. I’m adding just a couple of temperature/humidity sensors and am not too concerned about security, much less them being bricked if Xiaomi goes out of business. It might be easier to just buy the gateway and use that. In this case I wouldn’t need a zigbee radio, correct?

I don’t know much about zigbee, so I don’t know how prevalent they are in terms of commercial devices. Do most of them use WiFi gateways? Or are there a lot of them that will work with zha out of the box?

This might be an example of going with the cheapest and easiest solution and wait for technology to catch up.

2

That are a lot of questions, it might be better to ask them in the thread.

But I’ll try to answer the most important.

ZHA and zigbee2mqtt are different components.

For zigbee2mqtt you need the zigbee2mqtt addon (if you use hassio) or install zigbee2mqtt and an mqtt Broker.
That’s all you have to set up.

The zigbee2mqtt stick replaces the need of a Xiaomi hub. No China servers that could go offline.

The big advantage of zigbee2mqtt is that there are a lot of supported devices (around 200 currently) and this number rises with every update.
A bridge from a vendor like Xiaomi can’t do that.

Please ask further questions in the thread as they might help others too.
Unless it’s about buying a stick. This messages are supposed to be private.