I have a perfectly functioning Philips Hue bridge+bulb setup at home right now but I’m only working with a dozen bulbs. I’m building a house and going full… everything (context here if you’re bored) and have a few questions around Zigbee+deCONZ+Conbee 2.
Some notes:
I’m currently planning on a Conbee 2 stick and running deCONZ in a docker container.
The only Zigbee devices in the house will be always-on Hue bulbs.
I will have 300(ish) Hue bulbs/strips across the entire home. Yes, that many (big house, every bulb).
Some questions:
Will a single Conbee 2 stick handle that many bulbs assuming power is on to all bulbs all the time? (and if not, is it possible to have more than one running and what consequences does that potentially have?)
Is it possible to update Hue bulb/strip firmware in a deCONZ/Conbee 2 setup like this?
Will I have performance issues with a setup like this?
Zigbee network has a limit of 240 devices so you won’t be able to run all of your bulbs on a single Zigbee network.
If you use Docker you could conceivably run two USB Conbee II sticks and two instances of deConz as long as you mapped the published IP ports to non-conflicting ports. I wouldn’t want to guarantee this would work though.
Given your property is very large it may be better to run one portion of the property on one Zigbee network and the remaining portion on a second zigbee network. You could then place your USB Conbee sticks attached to a Raspberry Pi in each portion of the property. Might be better to run zigbee2mqtt on each Raspberry Pi and connect to a mqtt broker on your HA instance.
P.S. Not sure if zigbee2mqtt works with Conbee II usb sticks.
Heard from the Phoscon folks directly: “The ConBee II supports up to 200 network participants in mixed networks - with lights and end devices.” So that’s that!
I am planning on running two Zigbee networks but haven’t yet tried. Project for the holiday break!
Home build took longer than expected (SHOCKER ) so I’m just now getting back into finding a solution here. Ideally I would love the deCONZ integration to support multiple Zigbee sticks on the same machine but if push comes to shove, I’ll spin up a second machine, integrate via MQTT, and just use a different Zigbee channel. Pretty confident that will work. Will share as soon as I do it!
) so I’m just now getting back into finding a solution here. Ideally I would love the deCONZ integration to support multiple Zigbee sticks on the same machine but if push comes to shove, I’ll spin up a second machine, integrate via MQTT, and just use a different Zigbee channel. Pretty confident that will work. Will share as soon as I do it!