I started with Philips Hue like so many others and 3 years ago I had problems with Philips hue also with certain smart plugs becoming unavailable. Their 4 button remotes made trouble daily. There was always one that did not work until you did the 4 button reset of them. They same remotes worked great when moved to Deconz. Maybe - and hopefully - it got better with the Hue hub.
I also had two networks for a while but had coverage problems.
And I had problems with Deconz when installed as an Addon because of an issue in the Addon Docker container. Since I moved Deconz to its own little machine installed on bare metal (Debian and Deconz installed with simple apt install) things have been very very stable. And like Philips Hue - I can directly accociate some remotes with light groups in case HA is down.
I do not know if you can do this with Zigbee2MQTT. Maybe someone can fill in with that info
And my Conbee II stick is connected with a 2 meter USB extender and placed central in the house far away from interference. A USB stick with a radio directly in a computer is asking for trouble. People often blame USB3 but the real issue is that the stick is close to the noise source and computers with USB3 are faster then old computers with only USB2 and emmit more noise on 2.4 GHz. You have the same problem with Z-wave sticks. Always connect radio USB sticks with an extension cable and place the USB stick far from any other sources. You do not want to put your Philips Hue hub on top of your computer.
And to complete the advice. I am not anti Hue. I recommend Philips Hue bulbs and Philips Hue smart plugs over anything else. They are flawless Zigbee routers. Older IKEA bulbs can create trouble. And old Osram smart plugs are like a cancer in a Zigbee network. I threw 7 of them out as electronics waste and replaced them all with Philips Hue and that cured all routing problems I had before.
And I have the Hue 4 button switches in all rooms. They look good and work well
I also started with a Hue hub and in the end I migrated do Conbee2 with DeconZ, but since a while ago I’m using ZHA.
No chance to go back, as my currently solution is very solid.
But back to the original question from @wlmirand, I also have no questions about going to a USB dongle based Zigbee network. I still having a couple of Shellies where it would be too expensive to replace the old lights (like in some places where I have 4 spot lights with the same switch) and the combination works fine. I’m 100% local on my key systems, which includes lightning.
By the way, I believe this is the best comparative matrix covering the multiple zigbee implementations (not only for lights, but covering also sensors, controllers, etc.):
You are mixing up so many things here. Philips Hue is a brand, a product family incl. coordinator hardware (“bridge”) and an App. Deconz is controller software only for the Phoscon hardware (Raspbee II, Conbee II).
A hue bulb on mains does not behave different when being connected to a Hue bridge, a Conbee or a Sonoff Zigbee Stick.
A recent Hue bridge is more capable than Phoscon/deconz hardware, but a CC2562P based coordinator (like Sonoff) will perform equally to better than a Hue bridge.
Actually: Can you connect arbitrary Zigbee hardware to a Hue bridge or just “compliant” one?
It was not my intention to explain zigbee network components or software on top of it.
I don’t really compare A/B solution as they give different approach and different kind usage and not targeting same people in my sense (=>DIY vs Commercial product).
It’s interesting to share the experience about zigbee networks and not kill a possible solution that may fit the requirements of a community user due to some bad experiences but explaining cons/pro of solutions are a better approach.
I agree to the DIY/commercial aspect in general, but don’t forget you are on the home assistant forums. In general you could say that the average Hue user doesn’t care about protocols and just something that works, but I don’t think that applies in this setting. I see only benefits of changing out a Hue hub to a DIY solution (and also consolidating zigbee networks so you are not running multiple).
I started with Philips Hue ecosystem, so bridge and bulbs and some indoor motion sensors, integrated with HA. Then I dropped the Hue bridge in favour of a CC2530 based coordinator at one location and a Raspbee II at another location.
While the CC2530 performed okay at the first location (my house), the Raspbee II was perfoming badly at the other location, where I need address 50+ devices on 10.000m² ground. So, I finally decided to swap both coordinator devices and replace them with CC2562 based: slaesh’s at my home and Sonoff at the other location. All is working fine now.
I checked the Deconz software and it’s integration into HA once, but I had concerns about future support. And it is limited to Phoscon adapters only. Did the same for ZHA, which worked well but was to tightly coupled to Home Assistant.
For more than 2 years now, I am using a dedicated Zigbee2MQTT installation. Hardware controlled includes bulbs, sockets, motion sensors. Brands are Philips, Innr, Ikea, Osram, Tuya (and whitelabels).
All local, no cloud service, no internet dependencies.
If you can read German (or have a good translator):
I need to read this DE docs, but today I received my Hue bulb and the Sonoff USB Dongle.
My HA recognized it and I had the change to setup the ZHA, but I wanted to try the Zigbee2Mqtt instead (along with Mosquitto for MQTT).
Since I work with IT and I do have a personal server where I do my stuff, my HA runs over Docker so I had to work harder to properly add the Zigbee2Mqtt and the Mosquitto to my compose file and after some time configuring, it paid off and its working perfectly.
Im quite new to this, but there are some points that I can highlight about all the learning, specially from beginners liky myself:
I wanted to learn all steps and Zigbee2Mqtt docs are awesome
Setup like this separetes the Zigbee stuff from HA (I could see my bulb from the Zigbee2Mqtt web frontent even before adding MQTT to HA
I dont know yet how Zigbee entities were added automatically to my HA, but its nice see it under only one integration.
So, I just want say a big thanks to everyone that explained and suggested stuff here.
For sure Ill expand my device network.
Zigbee bulbs are a solid choice. They’re great because you can mix and match different brands and control them all from HA without needing any cloud accounts. Brands like Philips Hue and IKEA Trådfri are pretty reliable, and they can be controlled locally if you have a Zigbee hub that works with Home Assistant. This setup will let you tweak all the settings you mentioned, like color and brightness, straight from HA. For a hub, something like the ConBee II or using Zigbee2MQTT could be a good fit since they play nice with lots of different devices. I haven’t tried everything myself, but I read some solid reviews about them on https://leds.to/. They were the ones that helped me figure out everything about lighting in my house, and I’m confident they’ll have options that work for your setup. Just make sure to check for compatibility with your system!
I read this entire thread because I am interested in local and private control and automation of devices such as lights in my home.
I had at one time bought Yeelight bulbs, but at some point I said “enough” of being spied on by Chinese companies and sold all those bulbs. Besides, there were constantly some problems with them and I had to reset and reconfigure them many times.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about HA and Zigbee, seems like a boundless area of knowledge.
But I have slightly different requirements than the OP, but similar:
I plan to buy an IKEA bulbs
I need local and private control and setting automation scheduling, without sending data to the Internet or setting up accounts in the cloud.
I don’t want to do is I don’t want to have a dedicated PC or Raspberry PI on 24/7 to handle the bulb automation
I want to control it from Android phone
So my question is whether it is possible to connect 3 devices: (1) Zigbee bulb + Zigbee bridge/adapter (which one? Sonoff??) + control this from an Android phone?
I have an old Android phone that I’ve earmarked for installing apps like controlling vacuum cleaner, Bluetooth devices, etc. Mostly it has internet blocked.
I would like to use it for Zigbee lights control. After all, smartphones are small computers.
OK, so anyone knows about “minimal” and privacy-oriented solution to control Zigbee lights from Android without PC/RPI hub with non-proprietary bridge?
BTW @nickrout could you point me to working setup on Android? I mean link to how install HA server on Android (I found this, but it seems very tricky workaround). But especially bridge which can be controlled from HA on Android smartphone (as I suppose by BT or WiFi; or maybe Zigbee USB adapters could be recognized by Android OS??). Sonoff could be controlled in this manner?
Or maybe I should look somewhere else than in Zigbee ecosystem?
Afraid not. I didn’t bookmark it as it seemed like a pain in the a. And it seems like a very unproductive exercise that I am not prepared to Google for you, nor encourage, given that it is unsupported.
I bought IKEA bulbs and Styrbar remotes, connected them all via Zigbee and built NodeRed code to make the controls multi function to run 1 or all bulbs. Problem is randomly the remotes appear to link to a bulb or the bulb links to a remote and becomes useless. I’ll pull the battery on the remote and it might reset and work but often it’s a matter of just resetting the bulb, rebooting the remote and deleting the device from Zigbee2mqtt and relinking it to regain function. Very frustrating.
Anyone know of a solution besides buying some other solution?
WAF is very low at this point.
Update found that I was getting a button held signal without a matching released signal, not sure if it was the remote or nodered just not seeing it, but adding a timeout to the held latch for the remote has fixed this issue for me.
Referring to Google - since this is one of the first results in Google about local and private smart bulbs I decided to help for all others looking for such solutions to share the results of my in-depth research in last few weeks:
So if you:
need locally controlled and privacy-oriented smart devices (especially bulbs);
not spend extra money and generate costs (e.g. electricity) for additional servers, bridges or hubs;
use your old Android smartphone as a server (you don’t even need a wi-fi router if you enable a hotspot on your phone);
simplify the configuration (you don’t need to have IT skills, programmer, knowledge of Linux, Python, etc. to configure everything), because all can be configured and cotrolled from browser’s webpage or free android apps;
(optional) maintain compatibility with HA if you would like to run an HA server in the future…
… then solution is not a Zigbee, but pre-flashed Tasmota devices.
Specifically I bought and done all tests on: athom smart bulbs, but there are more pre-flashed Tasmota devices brands.
As I wrote earlier, I sold all my Yeelight spying lights.
And from a plug-and-play perspective and the cost of additional infrastructure, the Tasmota pre-flashed bulbs win out.
In addition - for more advanced users - these bulbs can be permanently programmable, e.g. behave like Philips Scene Switch bulbs, which can change the color temperature of the white when alternately switched on.
You can even program in these bulbs that e.g. in a toilet can light up gradually in a minute from 10% red to 50% orange color during the night hours - so not to wake you up when you need to visit the toilet at night.
The possibilities are enormous.