ZIGBEE - All the gear no idea

Hardware
1

Hi All,

I’ve recently moved into a new house and I have had a lot of plans to integrate stuff into HA.

The first thing I wanted to get working was my Zigbee controlled Curtains. I’ve been trying to get it working on and off for the last month or so to no avail.

I’m running HASS.io on a pi3 b+ and I have tried a few different Zigbee controllers. I’ve got a Raspbee HAT, Elelabs ZigBee HAT(EM357), Xbee HAT and a CC2531 USB controller.

I’m hoping I’m missing some documentation that is out there somewhere…

Now for the questions,

  1. Which controller will give me the best stability and compatibility?
  2. If the RaspBee would be the best to use, should I use the ZHA or Deconz component?
  3. Are the issues I’m having related to running HASS.io rather than the Native Home Assistant?
  4. Does /dev/ttyAMA0 work within the HA docker container?

Additional Info
Max distance between devices - 15metres
Other devices include
Zigbee lights(mainly Philps Hue)
Aqara Light Switches
Aqara Motion Sensors
Smartthings Motion Sensors
Smarthings Door Sensors
Zigbee LED Strips

Many Thanks
James

2

You don’t mention which brand your curtains are from.

What is your issue? That you can’t pair the curtains or are there bigger issue since you have a lot of other devices you don’t mention anything about.

Raspbee with Deconz component. Zha is improving but is not there yet and the integration with the hardware is really new so will need some time to mature.

3

Hi,

Sorry, just re-read my post.

The main issue is I cant seem to get HA to see any of the Zigbee devices using ZHA. I haven’t played about with the Deconz component much since I read a post about a slow response time from the API. So I was keen to use ZHA.

I added the following to the ‘configuration.yaml’

zha:
    usb_path: /dev/ttyAMA0
    database_path: /config/zigbee.db

Running ‘hassio homeassistant check’ comes back ‘ok’

Oh and the curtain motor is a Aqara.

4

deCONZ is near instant, shouldn’t be much difference with ZHA (though it would be a bit quicker in milli seconds due to no network transport needed)

5

:smile: So… after a few more hours of playing I’ve managed to get it working!

I can’t say for sure but I think the issue was with my config.txt file.(Possibly missing a space at the end of the file as pointed out in another post)

I started fresh edited the file again and using the deconz component I was able to control an LED Strip and Motion sensor…

Oddly when I looked at the hardware devices in via the HA UI, it listed /dev/ttyAMA0 & /dev/ttyS0. I thought the Zigbee controller connected to the Pi3 GPIO would of been /dev/ttyAMA0 but that didn’t work, changing to /dev/ttyS0 seemed to spring it into life…

Thank you for your replies :fu:

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