I’m waiting to receive my Sonoff Zigbee Bridge, and see that there are option to use either Tasmota or the eWeLink add-on? I’m guess of you have flashed over to Tasmota, but are there any really issues with using the eWeLink add-on as is?
I suppose the real question might be, does anyone know if Sonoff/eWeLink are planning official integration with HA, a bit like what Tuya are striving for? As this would save some minor headaches with cross-flashing the box?
They created a HA add-on, but that is not an official integration. There is an integration for Sonoff in HACS.
Don’t flash the bridge if you want to use it with ZHA, it is very unreliable. With Zigbee2Tasmota it works OK.
The HACS integration is cloud based for Zigbee.
Thanks for the info, just to double check, when you say don’t flash the bridge. Do you mean, don’t flash it to Tasmota as it doesn’t work well with ZHA?
Indeed, for ZHA it is unreliable. See the warning on the ZHA documentation page.
The EZSP protocol requires a stable connection to the serial port. With ITEAD Sonoff ZBBridge connecting over the WiFi network it is expected to see NCP entered failed state. Requesting APP controller restart in the logs. This is a normal part of the operation and indicates there was a drop in communication between ZHA and SonOff bridge.
Darn it! I was secretly hoping that EZSP/Tasmota would be a good fit/fix, if the eWeLink HA add-on was classed as being “no good”. I’ll certainly go and look at Zigbee2Tasmota instead of just Tasmota.
This is my first rodeo with Zigbee and HA, but I’ve used to Z-Wave (VeraPlus) with HA for some time now. So I should be able to get something working 
. Luckily I have no Zigbee products that are in use just now, so if I fail I can re-flash and try again 
I really wish some of these companies would realise it’s worth taking the time to talk to HA and get their products working directly with HA without too much messing around.
The Sonoff Zigbee dongle plus is cheaper than the Sonoff ZbBridge, and is an excellent choice for both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT.
Are you running Zigbee2Tasmota yourself? As I’m struggling.
I’ve got the Sonoff flashed, and I can in unit in with ZHA or as Zigbee2Tasmota. In ZHA my one and only Zigbee device just isn’t working as intended, I think this is more about ZHA.
But when in Zigbeet2Tasmota (MQTT) mode, I notice the autodiscovery isn’t working but Im now at a loss of how I setup devices?
Autodiscovery does not work for Zigbee2Tasmota. You have to define the device in .yaml
Darn it! I thought was going to be the case. It’s a long way outside of my comfort zone, I don’t suppose you have any good ideas on where I can try and find out how to do that?
I came across the following post, but my head started to hurt LOL