ZHA, DeConz/Phoscon or Both?

i am a bit confused

i have a Conbee II

i want to add my SmartThings button

but i installed Deconz and Phoscon and cant get it it work as anything other than a temp senosr

then…

i see explanations of how to make it work with ZHA, but I cant seem to get that installed.

Q: Does having Deconz installed block ZHA install? Or can you have both
Q: Does ZHA work ‘better’ or with more devices than Deconz? Because i cant get this button to work on Deconz

thanks

You cannot access the controller with two integrations at once.

As to ‘better’ there are pros and cons. You also have Zigbee2MQTT available.

Zigbee2MQTT

oh i didnt know this one

but the point is these are all NOT equivalent?

ie some devices will pair with some and not others

i just expected this SmartThings button to instant pair with Phoscon/Deconz but it isnt working as a button at all

They all provide the same thing:

Connectivity between a Zigbee network to Homeassistant, and they all do it slightly differently. As such youll find minor behavior differences. Each approach brings pros and cons. You will need to make the determination of which works best for you, yourself. (its not as cut and dried as SmartThings, where you use a hub or no.)

Personally the ability to easily write my own adjustments for ‘unsupported devices’ was why I personality went with Z2MQTT. I could absolutely use a feature of ZHA to push an OTA update to an ‘unsupported device’ right now but its jot worth switching for that. :wink:

ahh ok thanks

so maybe there is someway to make it work

My 2 cents… Deconz is bloaty rubbish. I tried it and found many devices not supported. As soon as I got rid of it and started again with ZHA, life was easy. I haven’t tried Z2M as I haven’t had a need for it so far but I do understand it provides a few additional features to ZHA.

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  • DeConz
  • ZHA

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When puzzling if a zigbee device works do check for events from the device on the developer tools event tab. Some don’t show up as switches or sensors, they just generate events when you click them and then you have to create your entity from that.

Example automation for one of my xiaomi switches…

- id: dining
  alias: one click Dining
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: deconz_event
    event_data:
      id: double_switch_1
      event: 2002    
  action:
    service: light.toggle
    data:
      entity_id: light.dining
      brightness: 254
      transition: 1
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