ConBee and Phoscon are both from Dresden, but the latter is pretty expensive in comparison to the ConBee.
I believe it was a tradfri bulb model that required an update to avoid flickering at low light levels.
Since I don’t own zigbee devices right now I’m undecided what to buy. I’d like to have something integrated in HASS and avoid extra configuration frontends/apps if possible but I’m not quite sure I understand what the HASS Zigbee management panel does (or replaces) and I think a can’t test that without having Zigbee devices…
I am completely agnostic about any device or service. The number one priority is reliability. In home automation 95% is not good enough. The most reliable piece of equipment i have at the moment is the Xioami Hub . I know the limitations , I have firewall rules to stop it phoning home. I use the home assistant cloud gateway to protect my HA from the internet. I use the alexa app to control my home remotely
Is deCONZ open source ? not that it matters.
The end result is I want to end up with one hub and one mesh , at the moment with my infrastructure, the Xioami is a good option, I know it works, it removes load from my HA and is reliable.
Until December I was looking at DeCONZ and ZHA, but with Tradfri now being supported , I will wait a little longer to see how the Xioami integration work out and how ZHA matures
@lonebaggie Simon I hear you regarding reliability. I have been tempted to migrate my Xiomi sensors one of the open zigbee solution but haven’t done it yet because I agree the Xiaomi hub is very reliable, very fast and until it breaks I just don’t see the need to be honest. So I’ll stay with it for now as well.
What rules do you implement in the firewall to isolate it?
With Conbee you don’t need to remove (all) your lights from the Hue hub as deconz talk to lights connected to the Hue hub as well. Although they will not be part of the whole mesh network it might make it easier to switch one by one.
Conbee is the Zigbee stick and it costs 40-50 Euro: phoscon/deCONZ is software free of charge, and, if I am not mistaken, opensource, you can find it in github
since @Klagio mentioned that you can get the software without paying for the overpriced gateway it makes even more sense to keep an eye on the ConBee.
i would already use one myself and happily mix Zigbee devices from different manufacturers, but not having the possibility to update the firmware in case of stability improvements really keeps me from investing in it…
I am using Deconz with a Conbee stick and the Hassio add-on. My reliability depends somewhat on the devices. Hue has been working fine, and Trådfri also pretty much, Xiaomi battery devices is causing me trouble. I am one of those who needs to update my firmware on the Trådfri bulbs, because they flicker, but that is not as straight forward as if I had had the Trådfri gateway. Also I from time to time cannot add new devices. If I could use only Trådfri or Hue hubs in my setup and only have one mesh that way, I would prefer it compared to Deconz, but I really like the possibility to have only one mesh with multiple vendors products, but as said my reliability is not 100% as it is on my Z-wave network.
Zigbee Transponder: Elelabs ZigBee Raspberry Pi Shield ($26 incl post via Tindie - more minimalist and less polished than RaspBee, but at least $10 cheaper)
HA stack: Home Assistant on Raspbian (makes me feel more in control)
Component: ZHA
Devices: Tradfri, Hue, Osram, Innr, GledOpto, so far a dozen
gateway: None
I ditched my Tradfri gateway when I got the Elelabs Zigbee shield, and have had a relatively smooth ride so far. We will see how it copes when I ramp up to 40+ devices soon, but using a dedicated Zigbee radio device has cut out a lot of complexity for me.
Under the covers the ZHA talks to zigpy and an IO api called bellows to speak to the radio. It seemed quite straight forward, the logs showed the chatters - the most complex bit was finding the ‘Permit Service’ to pair bulbs (i.e. not hard )
Interesting! I’m in my early days of getting home assistant up and running, currently have the Raspbee shield with Deconz running perfectly on Hassio but with this I think I’ll give the new zha plugin a shot! (I just have one innr outlet connected so won’t need to re-pair much)
how did it go? i’m currently considering a raspbee vs cc2531 and if zha worked fine for you, I’ll settle for a raspbee.
I plan to run everything on a single RPi3 so the integrated zha should be preferred to deconz, right?
I got it up and running and so far it works almost just as good. The two things I noticed so far is that the total consumption metric doesn’t seem to show up with zha (maybe just a Deconz thing?). Also I needed to upgrade the firmware for the RaspBee in order to get it to work with the zha plugin and the easiest way I found was to use Deconz .
Imho deconz is a bit more mature but zha is nice as it’s integrated in the same UI.
Since I started this whole thread off, I’ll just provide an update: I’ve now got my Conbee and various Xiaomi devices, and everything is working well with deConz.
Even though it seems a little heavyweight, i have to admit that turning on VNC so I can see the network layout is rather fun! And I’m now on something much faster than a Pi so I’m less concerned.
If I do ever switch my 30 or so Hue lights over to this from the Hue hub, the connection graph might be quite dramatic
.
. I’ll try zha first and only switch to deconz if i miss anything.