I’m new to all the smart-home stuff. Some time ago, I started with Aqara hub for some home automation things. I’ve realized only now when I got Sonoff zbbridge that I can’t use aqara hub in my HA setup because of the wrong version(no LAN mode) =
So, now I have a simple setup with just door sensors and an alarm that triggers if doors get opened in the Aqara app.
Yesterday I played a bit with ZHA integration and realized that there are no ways to use 2 coordinators in one network. I would like to keep using the original Aqara hub and also use my sensors in the HA. I want to trigger the light of my aqara hub on some internal conditions in HA, but I don’t know how to create software emulated ZigBee end-device. Do you have any suggestions? I would like to emulate any simple aqara sensors with any ZigBee library to be able to use the features of original aqara devices. Is that possible?
Simply speaking, I would like to make a “bridge” between 2 ZigBee networks. Are there any ways to accomplish this? Please give me some links.
If I am understand correctly.
I too have a Aqara v2 hub that is only able to be used with the Aqara mobile phone app or Apple HomeKit. I think I saw that some folks were trying to ‘hack’ it so it would be accessable from Home Assistant and other platforms. But seemed like a difficult task if it was possible at all.
The above for my v2 hub just seemed too complex and I could not determine if it would be successful if I tried.
So with that background, I think yours and mine Aqara hub is just a paperweight. I still have mine running but I have removed all the zigbee devices from it and moved them over to ZHA under home assistant.
You can only have one zigbee coordinator device per zigbee network, you are correct.
You can only have one ZHA instance running per Home Assistant server. So one ZHA zigbee network per Home Assistant server.
But you can have have Phillips Hue, Idea and other zigbee ‘systems’ all at the same time in Home Assistant server. But each of these ‘systems’ has their own private zigbee network with a coordinator on each.
And you can write Home Assistant automations that triggered by a zigbee device in one ‘systems’ that commands something in another ‘system’ in Home Assistant.
But my long and boring post summation is that unfortunately I do not think that nice chime, alarm and light in the Aqara hub is not easily useable in Home Assistant (that I know of today, but keep watching the releases if HA and HA forum and github to see if anyone is able to figure a way to access the Aqara hub with less effort and better possibility for success).
As I said above triggering other devices and alerts in HA is possible from ZHA. I trigger alerts on my iOS phone from zigbee events, trigger Sonos and Google Home devices to speak alerts again based on ZHA device events. It is a bummer to have spend the bucks on the Aqara device and not have an easy way if at all to use it.
You correctly asking question “Emulate HA entites as Zigbee End-Devices”,
The use case, we have nice looking Aqara and another chineese bran Orvibo LCD touch panels which acts as Zigbee coordinator, so they control only their own branded zigbee devices, The idea is,to expose some HA entities to ( ex: Lights, Dimmers, Sensors ) to these Touch Panels to control HA entities.