Hello,
I wanted to share my experience with my Home Assistant Yellow POE and my attempts to replace the Hue Gateway with the onboard controller.
Most of my devices are Z-Wave devices ( about 40 of them). But I also have 15 Hue lamps, which run with Zigbee. And I would also like to try more Zigbee devices.
Since the HA yellow now has an onboard Zigbee module, I thought it would be a good idea to replace the Hue gateway with the Silabs controller.
I have tried every possible combination. So ZHA and zigbee2mqtt, each with pure Zigbee, as well as multiprotocol.
The result was quite disappointing.
The first thing to note is that the onboard controller does not have nearly the range of the Hue gateway. So. for example, a Hue Iris in 5 meters distance and a wall in between is no longer directly for the Yellow to reach. The Hue Gateway has here but still an absolutely stable connection.
The second, really big issue for me, is that I have many Hue ceiling lamps, but which are switched via a Z-Wave light switch.
This means that the Hue lamps are sometimes without power. All tests brought the same, bad result. Such lamps were sooner or later no longer controllable. The connection to the device then seems to be completely unusable. Only a restart of ZHA or zigbee2mqtt made the device available again.
This behavior does not exist with the Hue gateway at all. If the lamp has power, it responds.
Also, the status of the lamps is updated much better and faster, and without further configuration.
So my conclusion is (unfortunately): The HA Yellow Zigbee chip has a worse range than the Hue Gateway and the connection to my devices with ZHA and zigbee2mqtt is not nearly as stable. So I’ll stay with the gateway for now and refrain from further Zigbee devices. maybe I’ll try a different controller.
What would be recommended in this constellation?
Thanks for your feedback. I’ve been considering a similar path as well to the number of hubs and minimise power consumption.
It’s interesting that the Hue Hub is better able to cope with devices dropping and reconnecting to the network than the two different Zigbee stacks (ZHA & Z2M).
Looks like I may have to consider keeping the Hue Hub too and using the HA Yellow radio just for Thread. However even that I’m unsure about as I need to determine whether the Apple Thread Border Routers are more resilient and/or secure than OBR.
That’s exactly how I’m doing it at the moment. At the moment only thread is running. I don’t have any experience here either. I’ll try Nanoleaf soon.
I was considering doing the same but after reading this…
If one bulb is close and connected, all others work as “proxy” and should drop off… or is even this behaviour different.
I can imagine you can’t answer this due to the issues, but how is the compatibilty in refrence to the hue hub.
As I now import the scenes easily created from the hub. and other " fancy" stuff like the animations within the hub.
The routing behavior is identical so far. With the exception that routing is often not used with the Hue Gateway, since the range is sufficient to reach the device directly. I have tested this extensively.
As far as compatibility goes, the only thing I noticed was that a new lamp with ZHA or z2m didn’t work properly until I updated the firmware.
In that case, I’l take those extra watts for granted…
I have couple of hue buttons to control the lights. And in a rare case the HA server is down, the boss at home should still be able to control the lights without hyperventilating and having a urge to kill me when I step in
The local API integration isn’t giving me any headache so far.
