I’m planning smart stuff for the new house, and I’m thinking about using ZigBee instead of ZWave for it. I have experience with ZWave in my apartment, all switches and some other stuff are ZWave controlled. But even here it was not very cheap, and when I think about how much money I’ll have to spend on a house, with not just lots of switches but also sensors - it just does not seem reasonable when there’s a much much cheaper ZigBee alternative.
I mean, 2-6$ for a switch instead of 20-30$, damn.
So I had a few questions for Hass community about ZigBee.
Which USB ZigBee stick would you call best? In terms of compatibility with Hass and devices. If it even matters
I know that unlike ZWave - there’s more fragmentation in ZigBee, not all ZigBee devices are compatible. So is there any way to figure it out before buying whether a device is compatible or not? Is there a list of tested devices somewhere? (If not it may be a good idea to, as a community, start gathering a list of ZigBee devices and sorting them by compatibility and feature support. Google Sheets spreadsheet may be good for this, for example).
Is it worse than ZWave in terms of obstacle penetration? All walls in the house I’m planning it for are from concrete bricks. Should work as a mesh, though, but still, any input on ZigBee’s vs ZWave’s distance\obstacle penetration is welcomed.
Is there frequency fragmentation like with ZWave? Where US, EU, RU and others have their own frequencies and thus are incompatible?
Any other information about using ZigBee with Hass will also be very helpfull
Next to Wifi I’m very dependent on Zigbee for home automation in HA. I have + 20 xiaomi-aqara devices (sensors, switches) using Zigbee mesh network. I’ve used the xiaomi zigbee gateway before moving over to zigbee2mqtt. With this zigbee solution you can use many products from different companies. See the zigbee2mqtt website and forum and many topics discussing this.
There are also alternative products like Deconz and Zigate, search the web.
Zigbee2mqtt can use different zigbee sticks but I like the cc2531 device which is very easy to use.
Zigbee is a mesh network topologie so to have a better quality network, have a better penetration and to use more devices then use zigbee routers. Almost all mains connected devices can work as zigbee routers.
Also you can flash the cheap cc2531 devices with zigbee router software.
Zigbee, Wifi and Bluetooth and others use the 2.4 Ghz bands. So it’s wise not to concentrate the devices as interference will increase. Spread out.
What are some notable differences between zigbee2mqtt, deconz and zigate? I never used mqtt for anything, not yet anyway, so the concept of it is new to me, and I’m not sure if I want to dive into mqtt unless I have to. It looks like it needs some additional setup time compared to other solutions.
Yeah, I know, thanks for the tip on cc2531. My only concern was that I may need to place some additional devices to act just like routers. A huge plus of zigbee is that it has unlimited number of hops between devices, unlike zwave. So while zwave has a distance limit, zigbee can theoretically span… OVER THE WHOLE GLOBE! At least from the sound of it.
Zigate is just a USB Zigbee adapter, similar to Conbee. I heard some good things about it, it has been released last year if im correct - so it’s newer than Conbee. It’s not easy to find information about it, as majority of its users are french-speaking at the moment.
I would love to see a comprasion of deconz, zigbee2mqtt and zha though. Im especially interested for reason to make zha if deconz was already well integrated with HA.
Oh, another question. I don’t think I’ll be able to fit Xiaomi aquara switches into boxes we have in our walls, they are smaller and circle, not square. Corners won’t fit into what’s the standard here.
I have no hands on experience with Deconz or Zigate but Deconz is a commercial and somewhat more expensive product but hear that users are quite happy with it. Heard from Zigate users that the development of this product stalled and it is a french product and website which makes it less convenient. Zigbee2mqtt has a large community, good explanations at zigbee2mqtt website, is in development with nice features added in last quarters with more to expect. And it is very cheap as it uses cheap but good hardware. But it takes more time and effort to setup.
MQTT is a mature and excellent IOT protocol based on a publish and subscribe model, see the wiki. I have almost all my devices now based on mqtt. HA has a mqtt broker inside but the mosquitto mqtt broker (a hassio add-on) is more stable IMO. Also when things are implemented on mqtt you are less dependent on proprietry (vendor) connection protocols which I regard as a big plus.
I’m not sure that the last statement would be a good idea
I use the single and double wireless xiaomi-aqara wall switches which can be placed over a classical wall switch hole. You are right, the mains connected xiaomi-aqara wall switches don’t fit in a European wall switch hole.
I use Sonoff’s flashed with Tasmota mqtt software to switch lights. They are wifi based and are functioning very stable. Others use Shelly’s for the same purpose but these are very small and can be build in a wall switch hole. With these you can more or less build the same functionality as you probably wish (switch can be used to turn lights on when home automation is not functioning aka wife stays happy ) .
Wife’s fine with HA and all, it’s not that. It’s really not practical to pick up your phone, wait for app\UI to load and then scroll and finally touch the screen where you need. Physical switches are just more convenient. Also more reliable.
There should also be a physical switch to turn off a light to be able to replace a lightbulb if needed without powering down half the floor.
In this regard I love my current ZWave switches, as they physically disconnect mains power to the light. Also - I don’t want to change batteries in every switch on regular basis even if it’s ‘only’ every 1-3 years.
I recommend you consider the zigbee to Mqtt bridge code that’s floating around on here with one of the cheap USB sticks reflashed.
I guess I was under an impression that I could use it with any stick, like open zwave can talk to most\any usb sticks. Huh
I think there is a rather low limit for the number of devices you can link to on of the ZigBee2MQTT sticks - if I remember correctly it is 16 or 20.
But, given that they are only $11 on amazon.com, I think you can install more than one per device, e.g. RPi3, or use multipel RPi3s with one each and just hook them up to the same MQTT broker.
@Michael_Davydov I went the zigbee2mqtt route. So far it mostly works for me. I have one sensor that is intermittent and I’ve added a router in an attempt to resolve the issues. Once you get past the basics the documentation is lacking and it’s not very clear how to troubleshoot or what the issues are. It’s even hard to validate things are working properly. Lots of documentation is buried in github issues. It’s a bit of a mess.
I haven’t given up yet. I’m still working at it but honestly I was expecting it to be easier considering the size of the user base. It’s been a bit of a challenge.
I have both deconz and z wave and for me z wave reliability wins with a big margin. With deconz it mostly works, but there is misses and more lag compared to z wave or at least that is my experience.
I AM using ZWave currently in my apartment. I’m planning on setting up smart lighting in a house. Naturally it will require a lot of switches and sensors and zigbee ones are very cheap compared to zwave.
At least from the sound of it.
) .