Starting with HA, Zigbee Thread and Haier

Installation
1

Hello.

After some tryouts of HA on VirtualBox I got Home Assistant Green with Sonoff Zbridge Dongle V2.

Main idea was to have an alternative to Haier HON (yes, i know) and add some HVACs and temp and humidity sensors. Zigbee and Matter for Haier.

So i flashed the dongle with Multiprotocol RCP, installed ZHA, scrapped it and then Z2MQTT.

After reading more current topics i found out that EZSP is deprecated, Multiprotocol as well …

  1. Is it worth trying to integrate Haier over Thread? Honestly, i am quite disappointed at Haiers policy, but now i am looking even more to manage the washing machine with 3rd party software even more.

  2. Is Ember so much better compared to MultiProtocol fw?

I understand, that its recommended to use multiple usb dongles, but atm i am still learning how home automation works, so i would not invest into multiple bridges.

2

Let me try and take a stab at answering your questions. Bear in mind that I don’t own a Haier appliance, and that my zigbee coordinator is based on zstack, not ember.

For the washing machine the only options you have are the custom integration, which references how disappointed you really should be with Haier’s policy . An alternative would be a power monitoring plug rated for whatever power your machine pulls, because honestly, all you’re gonna care about is when the laundry is ready.

For ACs, then there is built in support for Haier Climate via ESPHome, though if you really want to flip that particular company the bird, there’s similar solutions for Daikin, Midea & Mitsubishi.

Yes, the MultiProtocol thing was a good idea on paper, but not so much in real life. Trying to shoehorn multiple protocols on a single chip was never gonna be stable enough on current-gen hardware. Basically, at the moment, anything’s better than MultiProtocol :wink:

3

Thanks.

I actually like custom programs of the washingmachine and I would like to see them precisely in a custom integration - for the eventuality of end-of-support, but yes having an official addon for HA would send much better message.

So far what I Iearned about Multiprotocol is that it does not run on Zigbee dongle, rather on CPU of HA Green. Looks like when HW is emulated, and resulting messages are passed through zigbee radio.

So far just 1 coordinator and 4 end devices in Zigbee and no other device, but yes I already face some trouble with responsiveness. Switching from ZHA to z2m fixed some, using different channel fixed other…

So far I havent managed to integrate washing machine, and if it fail, Ember FW would be the way.