I read some good things about Xiaomi smart home products (cheap and working well with HA). However, when I want to order on AliExpress, I get completely lost in so many options from different vendors.
I’m interested in: the gateway, door sensors, and smoke detectors.
I live in Europe, so I probably need an EU-adapter for the gateway, but apart from that: there are versions 2 and 3? The door sensors: there are square and rounded versions (and maybe also older and newer models?). Smoke detectors: only one type, I guess? Any advice to make sure I order the right stuff?
I’ve used https://www.banggood.com/ for sourcing gear (prices vary but generally get a good deal and they deliver quite quickly given they are sourced from HK.
I didn’t go for the gateway (it speaks Chinese and I don’t and it’s also a bit tricky to integrate with HA). Instead I’ve got a deconz zigbee usb stick, which works a treat and which also allows connectivity of Ikea and Philips Hue lights.
The Original Xiaomi Mijia Smart Door & Window Sensor and Original Xiaomi Mijia IR Intelligent Human Body Sensor both integrate and work well. I’ve also used successfully the Xiaomi Aqara Smart Water Detector Alarm Sensor so any of that range integrates well.
Some excellent advice @Isablend! I didn’t consider buying a zigbee usb, but I don’t need the other stuff the Xiaomi gateway has. So I ordered a ConBee II stick. For the rest, I ordered the stuff from banggood. To be continued!
Thanks!
I ordered from AliExpress and have many Xiaomi things : Vacuum cleaner, door sensors, switches, vibration sensors, movement sensors.
When ordering I typically pay attention to price including shipping and rating of vendor and never had any issues. I really like the products. indeed cheap, but well functioning.
I also live in Europe and am not using a gateway, but Zigbee2mqtt flashed stick.
@Piggyback, thank you, sounds reassuring. I saw the Zigbee2mqtt stick too, but it looked like some extra complexication to me, so I chose the ConBee. I suppose once you get it to work, it behaves the same. @Argo, thanks! That’s what I ordered at banggood.com (apart from the gateway).
Great. Had never heard of that stick , so I went for zigbee2mqtt and ordered all of the items according to the instructions and it’s working great. I see others having conbee too, so should work.
I recommend zigbee2mqtt as a flexible alternative to the xiaomi hub (and other hubs). Im using it with 15 or so xiaomi sensors.
But like you say it does require some work to flash the zigbee usb dongle.
On the plus side the development of the core and the hassio addon is still very vigorous with new devices added regularly.
What is the difference between conbee and conbee II?
Its a good question.
As far as I know the coordinator alone can only address 15 or 44 devices depending on firmware, but by pairing additional routers you can add more.
I searched for the “old” Conbee, but you can’t buy it at Amazon.de anymore. Then I read a warning somewhere that there will be a newer version coming soon. This is what should be new/different:
Smaller and fresher look
32-bit ARM-Cortex-M0 controls instead of 8-bit AVR based SoC
Serial port is 100% backward compatible.
Faster firmware updates
New bootloader and GCFFlasher that only use serial protocols and no longer need root access.
Hi,
I am in the same process as the topic starter and I would like to ask if someone is using the HUSBZB-1 with Xiaomi products. The benefit of the HUSBZB-1 is the zwave support.
From what I understand the ConBee II and Zigbee2mqtt flashed stick are working well with Xiaomi but I found mixed information about the HUSBZB-1. Is anyone has experience with it?
Thanks in advance.
I am currently using the HUSBZB-1 on my Raspbian+docker+hass.io set up. I got it to recognize the Xiaomi Mijia door sensors. They show up as Lumi Magnet binary sensors, and they seem to be working fine.
I am still a HASS newbie, so now I am trying to figure out how to keep the sensors alive so they don’t go unavailable so I can use them as a HASS alarm system with tts messages going through my google home minis.
If any of you have experience with this, I would be very grateful for any tips.
I see that someone liked this and now I am able to answer what was going on. My Zigbee+Z-Wave USB dongle was plugged directly into my Raspberry Pi and it was in a meta l network rack. Due to this my zigbee signal was being degraded to the point that my sensors weren’t getting a strong enough signal. Once I put an extension on my dongle and moved it out of the rack, everything stopped disconnecting.
