[solved] How to connect a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle on an Rpi to home assistant docker on NAS?

Configuration Zigbee
1

Hi,

This is my very first time working with Zigbee. I bought a “Sonoff ZBDongle-E” USB stick as I will receive a Zigbee device soon (the Vindstyrka air quality sensor from IKEA) and apparently need some Zigbee gateway. I did some googling on how to connect the stick with HA and realized most tutorials expect Home Assistant to be installed on a raspberry.

However, my setup is that I have HA in docker on my Synology NAS and have the rest running on a raspberry (Homematic for example). Hence I would prefer to use this Zigbee USB dongle on the raspberry and somehow connect it to my HA on docker. Is that even possible? If yes, how so? I found some reddit entry suggesting:
“Here’s an alternative for you. Set up a headless distro on the pi3 and install the docker container for Zigbee2MQTT. Plug in the Zigbee coordinator and go from there. Then set up Mosquitto on one of the systems. Add the MQTT integration to HA and call it done.”

Is this the way to go (except that I’d install it as non-docker on the rpi I guess)? As said, I am brand new to Zigbee.

2

Yes, if you want to have the stick on another machine (e.g. because this is better in range of your Zigbee devices), this is the way to go.

You could install z2m directly, but if you can I would advice to start using Docker. Much cleaner install/updat process and not messing up different installations if one of them updates some general stuff.

2 Likes
3

Thanks! I figured docker would be overkill for a single application but your points are quite valid! I will look into that.