What ZigBee coordinator would be best?

Hardware
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1

What ZigBee coordinator would you recommend? I’m fairly new to smart homes and especially home assistant(only done research, not any actual setup yet) and I’m just wondering, what would be the best coordinator.

I’m planning on using ZHA, and do currently have a couple of IKEA TRÅDFRI lamps and STYRBAR remotes for them. I’ve read that I could use the remotes with a programm called ControllerX. I do have a RasPi, where I plan on running my HA and it could be located at a relatively centered location(doesn’t have to be somewhere like a basement).

Based on my own research, the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle plus would be good. I’m wondering, if the USB Dongle would have enough range for my two story house, which is about 95m2 in size.

If you think it’s range isn’t enough, would you recommend the Sonoff Bridge or something else? Flashing the Sonoff bridge sounds doable for me, but I would prefer not to do it, as I’m not too comfortable with it.

2

The sonoff dongle should be fine. Most zigbee devices that are mains powered are repeaters and will extend your network so the placement of these is what become important.

I use a ZBDongle-P in with zigbe2mqtt and is great but the ZBDongle-E also works with ZHA.

3

Thanks, I think I’ll buy the ZBDongle-E, as that seems like the only good option to buy in Finland, as the “P”-version doesn’t seem to be available anywhere!

4

Don’t!

Read the warning on that one on the zigbee2mqtt pages

6

Don’t do what? I’m not going to use Zigbee2MQTT, I’m going to use ZHA, so why would I read something from Zigbee2MQTT page?

7

I didnt have time to elaborate at the time so that’s why I said read it. Even the ZHA pages discuss the problems with the stack that’s used on the ‘E’ dongle. The zigbee2mqtt goes into much more detail on each type of coordinator.

8

I can’t find anything regarding the E dongles disadvantages.

In the ZHA pages supported coordinators, it explicitly said the E variant(see screenshot) and the P variant isn’t in the supported coordinators list.

Screenshot_2023-01-07-12-49-37-273_com.android.chrome
Screenshot_2023-01-07-12-49-37-273_com.android.chrome1080×2340 168 KB

9

And the warning in the ZHA page only says about the ZBBridge, becouse it uses WiFi

10

And in z2m it says that it is experimental, but I can’t find anything saying it would have any problems with ZHA

11

And actually with further research I was able to find the P variant from Finland, so that would probably be the one I’m going with, just in case I want to switch to z2m sometime in the future!