I need Zigbee to integrate with a lock (simple lock/unlock commands). What would the simplest and cheapest way of doing this be with Hass and a Pi, while still reliable?
You need a ZigBee stick and a way to communicate to Home Assistant. There’s zigbee2mqtt, ZHA and Deconz to communicate with Home Assistant and there are lots of different USB sticks you can use. I use Deconz with a ConBee II USB stick attached to my home server.
What’s the exact model of the lock you want to integrate?
Thanks for answering! 
It’s an Easy Access EasyCode V2, which you probably haven’t heard about. It’s a Norwegian brand. But of course it would be nice to use the Zigbee for other things too, there are things that are a lot cheaper in Zigbee than in Z-Wave (which I’m running as well, but on another Pi), like temperature sensors. So is Deconz reliable and not too much of a pain in the you-know-what to keep running?
Deconz/Conbee II running just fine on my rpi4 for more than 4 months (I’m quite new in HA). Just check their website if they support your lock vendor. If not … you may ask them on their forum. It’s German company so they might support NO company 
@furrylama I will probably run it on a PI 3B, since my 4 is used for Z-Wave, and I don’t like to have too may eggs in one basket. I have five running in the house, one with only the MQTT broker (so nothing disturbs it, since the rest is dependant on that, and it’s been running without a hitch for two years), one with an RFXtrx, and one with an RFXtrx and a Tellstick Duo, all in different areas of the house, all but one on cabled LAN. But thanks, I’ll try to check with Deconz.
I use ZigBee with DeCONZ now for over 2 years and had almost zero issues and a total downtime of 1 day (I was moving HA from a Pi to a NUC).
If you are heavily use MQTT already, I would suggest going with something that supports zigbee2MQTT (ConBee will support it soon also).
I agree and disagree at the same time with this approach. On one side it’s good to not put everything in one machine, on the other hand you need to maintain five different, OS etc.
@Burningstone Sounds good. And yeah, MQTT is the thing that’s tying the hardware running on my Pi’s and their software (Hass, Node-RED) with the virtual machine that does the heavy lifting and scripting, with EventGhost and Girder.
My system seems complex, but it’s because it’s been built gradually over 20 years or so, via Phidget, X-10 and finally RFXtrx/Tellstick/Z-Wave. Everything in the system has very close to zero downtime as long as nothing goes wrong on the Pi 4 where Hass is running Z-Wave (Z-Stick). That and the MQTT broker is the only thing that doesn’t have redundancy. The broker doesn’t need it, it never never stops as long as it has power.
Z-Wave can at times be tricky, so I have Node-RED on the same Pi listening to MQTT and check that Z-Wave stuff happens at least every minute. With one door lock (ID Lock 150) 5 floor thermostats and 8 plugs for panel heaters it usually does, but to make absolutely sure there is a Z-Wave switch in the technical room that has nothing else to do but switch from off to on every minute to make sure something’s going on. If that doesn’t happen Node-RED will reboot the Pi. If the Pi has locked up itself, I do have an extra Z-Stick running on a separate Pi 3B+ with stability as it’s only mission: If Z-Wave signals stop coming at least every three minutes from the P4 to the MQTT server, it will turn off power to the Pi 4, wait five seconds and then turn it back on. If any of the other Pi’s in the system locks up they do the same. Of course that’s not as critical since I have redundancies for those.
Of course I do have a few devices to run, but the upside is that the only thing that can be out at all is Z-Wave, and that is never out more than 3 minutes, except for the few times changes in the network has created problems, which I have fixed. Oh, and if something happens, I get an E-mail on a special account. So if I’m not sleeping, I will get to it at once, and if I’m sleeping I’ll get to it when I wake up.
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Were you able to get this running with a zigbee stick? I saw one of these recently on sale and I cant find any info that it runs zigbee. On the box it proclaims that it has bluetooth connectivity
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Not yet, to be honest… But they have come out with a new module for Zigbee recently. You can see that somebody managed it with SmartThing: https://community.smartthings.com/t/easy-access-easycode-door-lock-zigbee-module-compatible-with-smartthings-hub/86418/20
Edit: But it must be the V2.