Tired of the unreliable connectivity of Wifi when controlling critical stuff like lights, I want to move to Zigbee.
I’m going to move everything to the Hue bulbs, but I want to use something connected directly to HA for the hub. Anyone have some clear advice on a good, available USB dongle for Home Assistant, config/setup/adding Hue lights?
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Don’t add anything in zigbee until you read this! Save yourself the headache of trying to migrate later.
My initial Conbee and two hue lights arrived today, and between the pain in the ass that I apparently need a hue hub or something to put the lights in pairing mode, plus this makes me think it’s not going to solve any of my connectivity problems.
Just in time for my Wi-Fi devices to start dropping again for no reason.
Zigbee is notorious for mesh instability, mostly because some devices (looking at you, Lightify) are picky about what repeaters they use in the mesh. Build your mesh slowly, spread some good repeaters around your house, and give the mesh time to settle down before using it in production. Don’t move repeater nodes or power them off. (I had some lights that I had to delete and re-add every two weeks, until I figured out that the cleaners were unplugging a repeater to plug in their vacuum:-) Finally, make use of the “Visualization” tab under Configure to see what’s happening on your mesh.
My plan is to stick with Hue bulbs as much as possible. More expensive, but seem to be the most solid hardware.
Each device is a repeater, right? So I should try to make every device’s potential signal overlaps multiple others?
I have half dozen Hue bulbs, and they seem rock-solid - far more stable than my Lightify bulbs.
The HA SkyConnect does seem to be a factor. For a while, my Lightify bulbs were the last thing on my old Samsung SmartThings hub (via the HA integration- basically using the ST hub as a Zigbee radio/stack), because they operated more reliably there.
Yes, every line-powered device is (probably) a repeater. Many light bulbs are, with the caveat that you must keep them powered all the time. Having a bunch of repeaters drop offline will cause fits with your mesh stability.
How are you getting your Hue bulbs into pairing mode? My new ConbeeII stick doesn’t see them. I tried connecting to them with the Bluetooth app and then doing a factory reset, no luck.
I’m running a Sonoff usb dongle on a Debian Bookworm and a Lenovo Tiny PC. (I tried a RaspberryPi4 2gb but with Debian not enough memory) . but without the ZigBeeMQTT as that just kept give me problems, home assistant recognises the dongle on it’s own and all works just fine, so Debian, Mosquitto, HomeAssitant supervisor and the Sonoff dongle
I recently installed the Skyconnect dongle, as it’s promoted by HA and it’s matter ready https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/
I had a lot of trouble getting devices to stay online, they kept disconnecting. After adding more router devices, ie bulbs/plugs, it seems better. I’m using ZHA, so far only one device (an IR remote blaster) wasn’t compatible.
The one biggest thing I did that really improved my reception recently was buying a second dongle (Sonoff, they’re cheap on AliExpress and the newest version is pretty much the same hardware as a SkyConnect) and converting it to a router.
I have a few plugs that work as routers, but having a dedicated device with a legit antenna really stabilized everything.
I had a look at dedicated routers but found them quite expensive. I bought a couple of these zigbee plus, absolutely fantastic. Also very fast delivery. https://a.aliexpress.com/_mtDzhAq
Yep! I’ve got a few Sonoff plugs around the house that work quite well, although flashing a coordinator dongle to router firmware really tied everything together.
