HA, Aqara & Zigbee requirements confusion

Configuration Zigbee
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Hello HA community.

I’m completely new to all this but I’m planning on beginning this journey with a Raspberry PI 5 running Home Assistant with Ubiquiti cameras, Aqara sensors and potentially others.

The issue I’m having right now is that I’ve seen people say Aqara is plug and go while others claim users being required to register an online account with Aqara and download the Aqara mobile app and then download firmware in order to make the Aqara sensors usable with Zigbee. Others claim you need the Aqara hub in combination of plug & go and/or Aqara account.

Does anyone here know which one of the above is true? A bit of a deal breaker in regards to Aqara.

Will my plan bellow work?

Raspberry Pi 5 (Home Assistant) Raspberry Pi instead of Home Assistant Green due to being multipurpose
Zigbee LAN POE SLZB-MR1U Modular Zigbee & Thread Ethernet
Coordinator
ASUS ExpertWiFi EBP15
Ubiquiti UVC G5 Turret Ultra - 2K IP66 PoE (Limited to 2 links per post)
Aqara Door and Window Sensor T1
Aqara Temperature and Humidity Sensor T1
Aqara Motion Sensor P1

Zigbee2MQTT and/or ZHA & UniFi Protect (To begin with)

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True, if you have any supported zigbee dongle.

Not true. At least for nearly all sensors. Maybe their Microwave presence detector requires the app for configuration. Not sure on that one.

Not true.

I have many Aqara door/window contact sensors and a few temperature sensors. All paired without issue to my third party PoE zigbee dongle.

If you look hard enough you might find an Intel N100 on sale for the price of a Pi5. Much better hardware. An SSD will last lot longer than an SD card.

I believe that zigbee coordinator is well respected.

Note what I said about the P1 motion sensor above. That may require an app.

Do not buy T1 sensors from Ali Express. They are just about all not the T1 version and are in fact the older version that uses zigbee 1 protocol. The T1 uses zigbee 3 protocol that allows it to reconnect if the router it is paired to disappears for some reason.

I would recommend Zigbee2Mqtt over ZHA. It can be a little harder to set up at the start but it stays running in its add-on container when HA restarts, unlike ZHA which has to reinitialise every time you restart.

Can you explain what you mean by “multipurpose”?

Home assistant has some very strict operating requirements. And if you want to run other services they will have to be run as add-ons or you will need to install HA and your other services in a VM (e.g. Proxmox).

And an N100 would be better for this.

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As a general rule it’s a good idea to avoid using manufacturers’ hubs with Home Assistant (unless you have one already, in which case fair enough).

They just make life more complicated and they may shut down options that you want to explore later. You shouldn’t need them - HA is designed to integrate devices.

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100% agree with this.
That pi will struggle to handle cameras( you said plural) and HA and whatever your multitask is…

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Well, partly true.

You will only need their app to be able to switch from Matter to Zigbee on their latest products which support both protocols (H2 range and their upcoming FP300 mmwave sensor).
Using the app is a one-time thing while you tell the device to switch protocols. You can use a temporary email and delete the app as soon as you’re done 5 minutes later.

No hub required for this protocol switch - the app is enough.

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Interesting. Definitely something to watch out for.

They are planning on using T1 and P1 devices. So should not need it.

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I ordered 2 FP300s that were delivered today. I powered one up, switched mode and firmware to ZigBee, then exited the app without binding to an aqara hub. I added the fp300 to HA using ZHA and my ZigBee dongle. It only reported the battery, light, temp, and humidity sensors, no presence sensor reported. It also reported the battery at 0. Seems like mqtt might be the only way to use the fp300 directly with HA in ZigBee mode for now. I’m hoping I’m either wrong or that changes soon, as I’d rather not convert my ZigBee network from zha to mqtt and have to set up a bunch of devices again. I might just bite the bullet and by an aqara hub so everything gets exposed to HA using the matter bridge. For kicks I factory reset the device and added it to HA easily using matter, but confirmed that a bunch of functionality is not available in matter mode.

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Interested in the FP300 myself. So were you able to change the mode with just the Aqara app, you didn’t need the Aqara hub?

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I’ve just got a fp300, I needed to use the app to change to ZigBee. Z2M does detect all the entities fine, make sure you’re on the latest version. I’ve posted on here yesterday showing all the exposed entities in Z2M and HA

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Thanks, just found your other post. I wasn’t going to be buying a hub just for choosing the mode.
That looks like a lot of options on Z2M, when I can find one at a reasonable price in the UK I think I’ll grab one to play with.

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Looking at the activity on the ZHA GitHub, they are working on implementing the full functionality for the fp300.

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