WTH doesn’t ZHA support Friends of Hue buttons yet?

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
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“Friends of Hue” are battery-less ZGP (Zigbee green power) wall switches that are very popular in Europe. They work with a hue bridge as well as deConz but not with ZHA.

There’s an open issue in zigpy for two and a half years.

If HA wants to become a truly mass appeal solution lacking support like this is not cool.

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Hi
I’m new to ZHA and coming from deCONZ. I was very surprised that zha doesn’t support my Feller Friends of Hue Switch. Is there a way to support this with some beers/ coffees?

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FYI, this is really asking the same as this other post about the ZGP (Zigbee Green Power) specification:

As a workaround you should know that Zigbee Green Power is supported by Zigbee2MQTT and also deCONZ/Phoscon as well, however, it is not yet supported in Home Assistant’s own ZHA integration as no ZHA/zigpy developer has implemented support for ZGP in the zigpy library that it depends on as of yet.

As I understand it, allZigbee gateways/hubs that support ZGP has the requirements that ZGP devices connect indirectly through other Zigbee 3.0 router devices which in turn act as repeaters to pass along ZGP messages. That is, Zigbee routers do not really convert the ZGP messages, instead they just pass the messages along, meaning Zigbee gateway/hub application still need to explicitly support ZGP.

So in the end, Home Assistant need more volunteering Python developer(s) with interest in low-level Zigbee support to get that existing code pull request and open a new code pull request for the zigpy library (ZHA dependency) or create new code that is acceptable for merger:

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/pull/656

You might have many Zigbee Green Power (ZGP) devices, but statistically there are not many different ZGP devices on the market that are actually different products, (as most actually contain the same type of ZGP module made by EnOcean), however those available a relatively popular because of the “Friend of Hue” series as well as a few Philips Hue branded products that use the ZGP technology:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zha-might-soon-get-support-for-zgp-zigbee-green-power-devices/277149

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Although I find the wording of OP a bit strong and reeking of misplaced entitlement… I do agree that having support for FOH battery-less type switches in ZHA would be absolutely great.

I’m not a developer though so I no value to bring accept for the monetary kind. So if I can donate towards this goal… or send some smart person a specific wall switch, I like to hear how to do that. Thanx!

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is this zigbee green power for ZHA really still missing?
does anybody know, why it takes so long?

is there a workaround with a EnOcean Dongle?

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It’s taking so long because nobody volunteered to spend their time on this, and those who are paid to work on Home Assistant have done other things that they felt needed to be done.
I haven’t done it because a: I am not an experienced zigpy developer so I would need to spend a lot of time learning the code and details of the standard and b: I don’t have an interest in these devices, I have plenty of zigbee devices that work with ZHA.

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Zigbee Green Power Support by konistehrad · Pull Request #1282 · zigpy/zigpy · GitHub is there and was updated 3 weeks ago :slight_smile: