Zigbee and Home Assistant

Hi all,

I’ve done a bit of research here and honestly haven’t found much help. I’m a SmartThings user and am quite unhappy with their use of the cloud to control their hub. While the hub detects and communicates with zigbee devices very well, it doesn’t seem like Home Assistant does at all. I wanted to ask if anyone has any headway with this issue to making Home Assistant zigbee compatible. I’m not at all interested in using the SmartThings hub to get around this issue. That’s a workaround, not a solution. Besides, it would defeat the purpose of what I’m trying to do anyways, which is to ditch SmartThings.

Any help in this matter would be great. Thank you.

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how did you come to determine that home assistant is not zigbee compatible? did you look at the components sections? You have 3 avenues to add zigbee. Zigbee, ZHA and deConz.

As far as I know, this should work as a Zigbee controller in HA

https://smile.amazon.com/GoControl-CECOMINOD016164-Linear-HUSBZB-1/dp/B01GJ826F8?sa-no-redirect=1

Same boat as you, but in the Hue ecosystem. Seems like Zigbee support can be achieved either through ConBee Zigbee stick via deCONZ (which is super unreliable) or the Linear HUSBZB-1 stick.

What does seem to be a little more straight forward and reliable are wifi or zwave bulbs using the Aeon ZWave Plus usb stick or mqtt.

You’ll be directed mostly to look at docs, which is hard to consume for even an extremely technical user new to this whole world. Just keep reading and surfing these forums.

I’m very new to this - so read this as lightly as possible. I’m still trying to learn how to do these things, but finding someone to provide a step-by-step howto is hard. Everyone has their way of doing it. I guess it’s the beauty of the “free world”?

I have just implemented the ConBee/deCONZ, since it was support by Hassio just some weeks ago. Still buggy.

But I have the impression that the HA-team and Dresden are on the case with rapid updates.
Maybe wise to stall for a couple of months.

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Yea - that’s what I’ve gathered as well. Seems almost there, but not there yet.

Just look into integrating your existing hub with homeassistant, no need to get anything else. The zigbee stuff has been unreliable for me at this point. https://home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/09/Smarter-Smart-Things-with-MQTT-and-Home-Assistant/ That tutorial makes it a little more complicated than it needs to be with the mqtt bridge part. Just set up mosquitto and a bridge on that.

No go, I don’t want a bridge. The SmartThings hub is useless without connection to their cloud. What’s the point then when their services go offline or if my internet is disconnected for some reason? I’m moving to HA for a reason :slight_smile:

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Would this work out of the box with raspberry pi with HA installed? Any instructions to make this work, or is it plug and play?

Gotcha, I was thinking that part of it would work without the cloud. The USB stick should work for you, but like I said I get oddness without my ZHA devices where they stop reporting, your mileage may vary since other people do have it working.

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I am running RPI3, ConBee USB Stick with deConz.
My advise, wait a couple of months as long you don’t want to be a beta tester.

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Let’s hope so. I’m about to purchase the USB stick and I hope it works well. My goal is to be able to just get rid of the smartthings hub in general, maybe sell it to someone who can use it, and integrate all my stuff this way.

FWIW, the zwave part of my stick works flawlessly.

I unfortunately only have one zwave device. All the rest of my two dozen devices are on zigbee.

I have all three and all are unstable. Works one second and doesn’t the next.

I have the HUSBZB-1 stick that use for zigbee and have only had one issue in over 6 months.

And the good news is that you get a “free” zwave controller too. (that I don’t use since I already had a Aeotec Z-stick)

What kind of lights are you using?

Singled brand

Also using the HUSBZB-1 stick after migrating everything from my smartthings hub.

Smartthings, despite their recent downtime, was extremely reliable, never had to touch it once! Downside is that MQTT was super laggy due to the multiple remote server round trips.

The ZHA component for the HSUSBZB stick has some quirks, had to patch some code to get my Ikea bulbs to connect. Also recent versions of HASS are triggering alot of timer resets, which puts the device into an unrecoverable state, which requires a restart of HASS. This appears to be happening every few hours with the latest 0.62 build.

Discontinued product I am afraid.