Hi there!
We* have developed a LoRaWAN based range extender for Zigbee sensors. With it you can convert cheap zigbee sensors literally into LoRaWAN sensors and use them in Home Assistant.
The full installation includes a bridge Raspberry PI equipped with zigbee2mqtt and LoRaWAN transceiver. Further, a gateway Raspberry PI with a LoRaWAN gateway hat includes Chirpstack for LoRaWAN communication and Home Assistant as the home automation framework. The setup is quite easy using the Ansible playbooks provided in our repo. This will automatically fetch and run the Docker containers needed on the bridge and the gateway as well. Detailed instructions are available in our docs.
Usage
Pair sensor devices to the bridge PI:
Adjust data you want/don’t want to forward in bridge PI GUI:
Sensors appear in Home Assistant as “LoRaBridge” sensors just like they do for ordinary zigbee sensors with Z2M and MQTT integration discovery:
Required components
2 x Raspberry PI 4B (3B might work as well)
1 x Adafruit LoRa Bonnett
1 x Dragino PG1301 LoRaWAN Concentrator
1 x Zigbee coordinator stick compatible with Zigbee2MQTT
How it works
The bridge PI collects MQTT data from Zigbee sensors and compresses it using dictionary compression techniques. At the gateway PI, the data is decompressed and sent towards home assistant. Moreover, the gateway PI takes care of device discovery/management.
Known limitations
- Only EU868 LoRaWAN band is supported in the current version
- Range extension is implemented only for uplink communication. This means: Control of lightbulbs,
powerplugs, etc. is not supported - Range extension adds some latency to the measurements
Documentation
More information available under the official project documentation
Take care,
H.R & T.D.