I have a pi3 (HA) and telldus 433+zwave. It’s about time to move to lighting and zigbee seems to be the way to go. Now, which hub to select? Any good/bad experiences?
Checked a few, e.g. Smartthings, Cozify, IKEA… Each seem to have some issues. Just googling, and:
IKEA supports 30 zigbee devices (I’m going to have eventually way more) and possibly (?) has limited 3rd party integrations
Cozify as well supports 30 zigbees, and is thus expensive (250eur) as I already have z-waves & all.
Samsung Smartthings seems great, but many different opinions on its offline capabilities. I can’t figure out if it’s simply useless in case internet connection is down.
None of my automations are in internet anyway, don’t feel comfortable in stuffing automations to cloud. Because I don’t need to. My local pi3 is great. And, I don’t really need any automation capabilities in the hub itself (I think), I’d do everything in HA. I’m not exactly a programmer, so DIYs are out of question.
I came to Home Assistant from Smartthings and haven’t looked back. It’s been almost a year, but at the time you are correct - if internet went down (or their servers, which was at least monthly), you were out of luck. Local processing is what drew me to Home Assistant.
This may not be what you were looking to hear lol, but I also just recently ditched all of my zigbee equipment. Native zigbee support is still very much under development, and I couldn’t stand the instability (but greatly appreciate the work the devs are doing on it!). For the lights I had that were zigbee, I switched to TP-Link Wifi bulbs. Only been a week or two, but so far no complaints! These are also locally processed - I didn’t even have to connect them to TP-Link’s cloud service or create an account with them; just used the app to connect the bulbs to my network and added them to HASS.
All this being said, if you are still wanting to pursue the zigbee route, I have a Sylvania/Osram Lightify Hub and four bulbs that I am looking to part with… Since these can connect to the hub and use the Lightify component they were pretty stable, but since I was getting rid of all other zigbee equipment I didn’t make these an exception.
I personally opted for the Zigate device (www.zigate.fr) which is 40 euros, connects to the pi via usb and is vendor neutral.
In fact it’s firmware is open source. I use it in HA with a custom component in order to use my Xiaomi devices.
I found its range and stability quite good.
I also have a Philips hue bridge because that’s what I started with.
Don’t know what (if any) limit there is on the number of devices by the way. I think that also depends on if your Zigbee devices are connected directly to the hub or if their messages are relayed through other Zigbee devices. The limit is the number of simultaneously, directly connected devices if I have the Zigbee specs correctly.
thanks @Brett_C. WiFi is not a great option due to distances in my ranch (not really ranch). Zigbee/Z-wave’s mesh is quite attractive. Seems like all of them (also) have a lot of pros/cons. Price (z-wave), reliability (e.g. 433), range (wifi, 433), non-standards (zigbee)… Sigh.
@mvdkleijn, Zigate seems to be out of stock. Open source would be nice, even just philosphically. But that’s very interesting point if the device limit is only for those connected directly to hub. I guess bulbs could decide to go serial, only one connecting to hub, never going to limits? Sounds bit… Ok, well, suppose there are limits in mesh as well - not necessarily though, I know a company making full mesh sw stack, tested with 500 hops without issues. Hm. Just wondering, a limit might be hub’s internal automation capabilities, or performance. Automation capabilities doesn’t matter, as I’d use HA anyway. Guess hub just listens to radio and relays the messages to pi. Performance could be an issue, but I doubt bulbs are too talkative.
Hmm too bad it’s out of stock. It was a kickstarter originally and I guess it’s more popular than they can handle?
From what I understand, the whole relaying thing is also used by Hue for example. For their new entertainment area option, they even ask you to show the layout of lights and calculate which lights are closed for optimal relay speed.
As for Zigbee non-standards… I thought the same but the Zigate guys figured out that lot’s of Zigbee things are actually mostly using the standard. For example, Xiaomi is the Zigbee Home Automation standard. In other words, you don’t need their gateway device despite them saying you do.
Part of my experience with zigbee was also that the controller needs to work with the device; meaning just because both support ZHA standard, doesn’t mean they work together out of the box. It’s possible I just had faulty/cheap devices, but there were two or three things that I simply couldn’t get to work with Home Assistant’s ZHA component even though the devices were ZHA. Someone more in tune with the ZHA standards may be able to speak to this more eloquently than I lol…
I’d recommend you looking in to a Conbee usb-stick with its deCONZ software. It is not open source but it is actively developed by the company and supports most devices on the market.
Once I have zigbee stick/hub my setup should be something like: zigbee switch + zigbee hub/stick + zigbee configured in HA using MQTT, is this correct?
which other consideration should I have before buy a stick/hub to controll my swithes?
We have created 2 new products, compatible with Home Assistant ZigBee component:
Elelabs ZigBee USB adapter
Elelabs ZigBee Raspberry Pi Shield
I won’t leave a link here, not to spam the thread, but you can find them easily in any search engine.
We have also created some user guides on how to get them working with Home Assistant, so you could get started easily.
Hi!
The USB adapter 100% yes.
The Raspberry Pi Shield is not yet tested (probably end of next week). But preliminary Yes, it is.
Will post an update, once we test it.
I have theelelabs raspberry pi shield and it works fine with the ZHA component but I struggle with the remotes. I have tried both the mini remote from Osram and the Remote from IKEA but they both show up as binary switches and I cannot get them to control my lights. The bulbs themselves join fine and I can control them directly with no issues. Colorscale and all!
Anyone got guides on mini remote adding? Preferrably IKEA or Osram since these are theones I have in my drawer.
The osram one at least add three binary sensors, and one of them even turned from off to on when I pressed the key. I could probably do some automation to move it to off again (it only turned on…!).
I’m currently running HA in a docker container managed by Rancher which is in a VM on my FreeNAS. Would something like Elelabs Zigbee USB Adapter be accessible through all of these layers?
Hello everyone, i have some doubts about whats the best way to go with my zigbee lights,
I have about 17 zigbee osram sylvania lights paired to my Abode Iota alarm (goabode.com/), since this hub doesn’t recognize my lutron connected bulb remotes (to manually control lights in case I have people visiting), I decided to buy a Nortek Zwave/Zigbee Usb dongle.
Just had it installed and set them up with some automations and they are working “OK”, the main problem is that sometimes the zigbee network, seems to be too slow (4-10 seconds response time). Also had this problem when I had my lights paired to my Wink Hub. So the question here is: Will it be worth trying to switch all my devices from the Iota Hub to the Goncontrol Zigbee Dongle? I think this would may avoid an unnecessary cloud connection but im not sure, thanks in advance for your recommendations.
Since these can connect to the hub and use the Lightify component they were pretty stable, but since I was getting rid of all other zigbee equipment I didn’t make these an exception.