Standalone zigbee with ha integration

Configuration Zigbee
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Hi all, I’ve been running deconz for years on a raspberry pi3, and recently I’ve been addiing a lot of sonoff zbminis. i now noticed the pi having load over 100% so I’m looking for a better solution.
I’ve got an unraid server which runs HA and some other docker containers and idealy I want to separate my zigbee installation from that server.

I’m looking for a standalone zigbee solution, without having to worry about updating a raspberry or restarting the pi in case it crashes. I want a robust zigbee coordinator, ideally one that runs zigbee2mqtt or zha directly on the coordinator, that is still accessable directly in case ha, or worse, my server fails.

I’ve been looking at poe zigbee coordinators, sonoff bridges etc but I cant find any conclusive information if those devices also work without HA or zigbee2mqtt running on a remote machine.

Can you point me in the right direction?

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There’s none that do what you’re after, unless you want to limit yourself to a manufacturer hub (don’t).

1 Like
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The ZHA integration does cureently not have a distributable architecture (client-server model), probably Zigbee2MQTT is you best option today if that is what you are looking for as your primary requirement.

Suggest migrating your Home Assistant instance to a virtual machine (e.g. VM running Home Assistant Operating System image) on your unraid server and then run Zigbee2MQTT on the Raspberry Pi.

Recommend CC2652P based Zigbee Coordinator for Zigbee2MQTT, and maybe consider a network-attached variant (uses Serial-over-IP) if planning on running it on NAS or server-hardware that can not be located in the center of your house (for example check out adapters from TubeZB hardware for North America and/or ZigStar hardware in European Union).

Regardless suggest read and follow these related guidelines → Guide for Zigbee interference avoidance and network range/coverage optimization

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exactly what I want to avoid yes… ok, so no controller that runs zigbee2mqtt or zha natively… too bad.

@Hedda why should i run HA in VM? It uses more resources and I rather have seperate dockers setup outside HA so they continue working if HA VM fails for some reason.

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I believe can hack some commercial IoT hubs/gateways and make then run Zigbee2MQTT locally, but do not think that there are any that run it out of the box, so easier to install Zigbee2MQTT on an old Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer (it can even be and Raspberry Pi Zero or Raspberry Pi 1/2) and run Home Assistant on a seperate faster platform (as Raspberry Pi 3 will almost too slow for Home Assistant if you run a lot on it).

If you prefer container then use that. I prefer the Home Assistant Operating System image is desiged to be a an appliance which makes makes it very easy to maintain, that is why it is the recommended installation method and why the majority of users uses it (with container being the second most common installation method).