Dipping into Zigbee

Friday, October 11th, 2024 at 09:35pm

After my recent incident with my front door being open unexpectedly I started to look into Zigbee and Z-Wave devices for integration into Home Assistant. I quickly started to lean towards Zigbee for both price and ease of use reasons, but I was going to take it slow in case I did pivot to using Z-Wave.

(side note: while technically Zigbee is used to get data from my smart meter, that is a custom/closed interface that I cannot access)

To get started I ordered a Zigbee gateway, a couple of Sonoff door sensors, and also stopped by Ikea to pick up a couple of their door sensors. While there I also saw their motion/light sensor, so grabbed one of those.

When the gateway arrived I set it up on my wifi and then pointed the ZHA integration in Home Assistant at it. This worked but it felt quite slow and clunky. After doing some more reading I learned that they recommended against using serial-to-IP over wifi, exactly what I was doing.

My next setup was to bring up a container for Zigbee2MQTT connecting to the same Zigbee gateway. This was a much nicer experience so that is what I went with… for a few days. While initially this would work and respond immediately to the door sensor or motion sensor, after a couple of days it became less reliable, sometimes just dropping out and requiring both the gateway and container to be restarted.

I realised I needed to simplify the connection between Zigbee2MQTT and the gateway, make it as direct as possible. Looking at available options I decided on a SMLIGHT SLZB-07p7 Zigbee coordinator which has a USB connection, meaning as direct serial connection as possible between zigbee2mqtt and the gateway/coordinator as possible.

However I was running Zigbee2MQTT in a container on the linux box in my study, this is not the best location for the Zigbee coordinator, I still wanted that central to my house which means the laundry (where I had placed the first Zigbee gateway). So how to solve this? With a Pi 3 model A+ as I used for the RAVEn smart meter dongle:

I have read that there might be interference between the Zigbee and wifi for this configuration, but that can be reduced by spacing them out with a short USB extension cable. For now it has been working quite well, but as always, time will tell…

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