Ebyte E180-ZG120B-TB development board as Zigbee 3.0 coordinator for ZHA?

Can anyone confirm if the EFR32MG12 based E180-ZG120B module from Ebyte works with ZHA?

Ebyte is making an inexpensive development board called “E180-ZG120B-TB” made for testing it.

This development is sold for less than $9 US-dollar on Aliexpress or about twice that on eBay UK:

You can also buy them on bulk from Alibaba for less:

Looks like you can remove some jumpers to disable the USB converter if want to use serial directly.

E180-ZG120B by Chengdu Ebyte (CDEYTE) has 20 dBM powerful Zigbee 3.0 radio for 2.4GHz capable based on an EFR32MG1 Series 1 MCU SoC / chip, specifically EFR32MG1B (IC = EFR32MG1B232F256GM48), from Silicon Labs EFR32 (“Mighty Gecko”) family.

EFR32MG1B232F256GM48 includes a 40 MHz ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller with 256 Flash, 32 RAM and a rich peripheral set in a QFN48 package. With 19.5 dBm maximum output power and receive sensitivity of -101 dBm (250 kbps O-QPSK DSSS). Key Specs: 19.5 Output Power Max (dBm) / 120.5 Total Link Budget (dB).

I understand this also is classified as an Ember based radios using the EZSP (EmberZNet Serial Protocol) serial protocol (UART bus) interface so could therefore be made compatible with the bellows library for zigpy if the E180-ZG120B module is flashed with the right firmware?

I guess that my follow-up question will be which exact firmware to use on the E180-ZG120B module?

Ebyte is now making two EFR32MG1B based modules called E180-ZG120A and E180-ZG120B

E180-ZG120B modules by Ebyte (and their previous E180-ZG120A) seem now to be readily available as sold on Aliexpress and eBay at relatively low prices.

Example:

Perhaps this board could dethrone Nortek HUSBZB-1 for ZHA as the new must-have Zigbee adapter?

The only thing which makes me hesitate about these is the availability of the Silabs SDK and therefore what firmware these are running. Unlike their zwave SDK, which is free, Silabs has reserved their zigbee SDK only to people who purchased their expensive dev kit…

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Yes I read that after posting and bellows developers are discussing that on GitHub for those interested:

https://github.com/zigpy/bellows/issues/243

Best be if Home Assistant sponsor developers of the ZHA integration with official Zigbee dev kits (?).

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/zigbee

Silicon Labs official EFR32MG12 and EFR32MG21 around $500 US-dollars, however, there is a $99 dev kit that contains other Zigbee radio boards and still gives developers access to their Zigbee SDK:

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/zigbee/mgm220-wireless-starter-kit

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/efr32xg21-wireless-starter-kit

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg-zigbee-thread-starter-kit

That way ZHA devs could build and share compatible EZSP firmware similar to how Zigbee2mqtt does:

https://github.com/zha-ng/EZSP-Firmware

https://github.com/grobasoz/zigbee-firmware/