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Sourcing Local Network Only, HA Friendly Devices
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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I use a lot of Aquara Zigbee sensors with a USB bridge on my HA server. It works well, and is stupid cheap.
I've read Zigbee is fairly open, but wasn't sure if that was universally true or only with certain brands, etc.
It works but the manufacturers' implementations may be a bit wonky at times. Still it's cool not to have devices on the wifi, and zigbee2mqtt is just great.
It's an open standard, and you can talk to any Zigbee with any Zigbee USB tranceiver.
It's also mesh-based. I use Hue bulbs as repeaters, but any Zigbee device that is plugged in to a wall should work.
That sounds exactly what I want. I will definitely be looking into a Zigbee hub.
Any problematic Zigbee hubs I should watch out for? Or just look for one that's explicitly supported by HA?
They post a list of recommended devices here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/
Awesome, thanks. That's a great starting point.
Also, it'll be nice to free up some wifi spectrum. My devices are all on an isolated 2.4 GHz network and that band gets quite noisy.
If you have an mqtt server running already, you may want to check out zigbee2mqtt as an alternative to ZHA. Here's the supported adapters list, most of them are USB dongles that you'll have to plug into your home assistant machine.
Yeah, that's probably the direction I'm going to start looking. Pretty much every device I run uses MQTT to communicate with HA, including some custom buttons I keep around the house.
The only sticking point is going to be reconfiguring my HA server to speak to a USB device. It's currently Dockerized, and I've got little experience passing through USB devices that aren't serial adapters. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a speedbump.
I've tried a few different USB zigbee coordinators, but the one I ended up sticking with is the 2652 based coordinator from tubeszb that is Ethernet or USB. I had issues with the USB passthrough to the vm whenever I had to restart the vm, so using that one over Ethernet fixed all my issues.
Yeah, ethernet would be my preferred bridging mechanism. Thanks for the recommendation. Will look into some bridges from TubesZB.
Passing through a USB device might be as easy as adding
--device /dev/your/usb/deviceto yourdocker runcommand-line, first making sure the permissions on that device are such that they can be read by the container. (Or use thedevices:equivalent if you're using Compose.)