ZWave + Zigbee USB dongle replacement for SmartThings

Hardware
1

After today’s downtime of the smartthings service, I am not seriously looking at moving all my devices to natively hosted on my HA machine.

I see a ton of threads with different devices being used, zwave seems mostly working, but zigbee appears problematic.

Is there a overall recommended device that could be used? I have a bunch of switches/lights/outlets/motion sensors/locks etc on both zwave and zigbee networks.

2

Try searching for HUSBZB-1, it is a combination USB stick for Z-wave and ZigBee control. I have one but haven’t tried to use it yet. I am mostly using a zwave stick.

3

This is the one I have been looking at, but having problems understanding the zigbee compatibility.

4

Just purchased this on Amazon so will give it a whirl.

5

I started off with the HUSBZB-1 and had issues in the beginning losing control of zigbee devices until a restart. I ended up moving my install from a raspberry pi to an old desktop I was not using. Since the move I had also purchased the aeotec z-stick for my zwave devices. After this new setup my issue with zigbee seems to be gone. Support is fairly new as well as you don’t get battery reports or energy readings yet. I do have several contact sensors and smart plugs setup that work pretty well now.

6

I’m going to try this in a machine running freebsd. What OS is your old desktop running?

7

Ubuntu 17 server

8

I currently have a HUSBZB-1 and it works fairly well. I have no issues at all the with zwave devices. My zigbee devices however sometimes don’t function properly. I believe that has to do with running it off of a raspberry pi and I’m currently in the process of migrating most of my setup and just having zigbee and zwave on the pi. It seems to be helping a lot so far!

1 Like
9

Hi aterox, if you leave the zigbee running on the pi, wont you still have the same issue?

10

My hope is that off loading everything else will let the pin use more resources for zigbee and zwave. It actually seems to have helped.

11

For me, moving off the pi entirely resolved many issues. Including zigbee stability.

1 Like
12

I didn’t realise it would be so resource intensive. I wonder if the zigbee device is offloading the processing to the main CPU.

13

Setup my HUSBZB-1 device, was a bit wierd to start with but now I have 3 zigbee devices paired and its all working good. The latency is awesome compared to the smartthings :smiley:

14

Glad to hear it. I have a number of sensors I purchased with smartthings but have never used, maybe I will get some time to hook them up.

15

So far I paired a couple of SmartThings outlets, and also a Ikea smart bulb. Next will try and integrate a few zwave devices :smiley:

16

any attempt to connect a ST water sensor yet?

17

I would check this thread.

18

winter: Please share your config/setup. I’m having the hardest time getting a HUSBZB-1 working with an Iris motion sensor. As far as I can tell, the sensor is paired, but it’s not reporting any motion to HA.

I’m also trying to move away from ST after the recent incident.

19

So I had some initial success getting sensors to pair, and then I was unable to do any more. It seems that the HA recognises that a device is paired, but then fails to get the end points and leaves the device connected in a weird state. Unsure of what exactly is causing the issue.

My configuration is:

logger:
  default: error
  logs:
    bellows: debug

zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/cuaU0
  network_key: !secret zwave_network_key

zha:
  usb_path: /dev/cuaU1
  database_path: /home/hass/.homeassistant/zigbee.db
20

For some reason, I can only occasionally get the Ikea smart bulb to connect. Most of the time it just fails :frowning: