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?
I got myself a Sonoff Zigbee dongle about a year ago, I think it was somewhere around €20 so it’s not too expensive. I use it with Zigbee2mqtt, which is not hard to set up if you run Home Assistant OS or Supervised. It should work with the HA Zigbee integration as well, though
This, plus read something about zigbee channels before you at it up. Some might interfere, others may not be supported by some devices, so choose wisely. I’m using >70 devices with a conbee 2 coordinator (which I recommend).
Is the Conbee 2 coordinator the same device as the poster below’s Conbee II?
Yes
I just bought that dongle this weekend. I’m setting up my first HA instance. You can flash a firmware on that dongle that also adds thread/matter support so you have both on one dongle.
https://darkxst.github.io/silabs-firmware-builder/
I think this is where I’m getting frustrated. (On top of my frustration that like 4 lights just decided to stop connecting to my Unifi for absolutely no reason again.) It’s not clear if I can just plug into the HA Zigbee or if I need MQTT or if they both have their uses or when/why, etc.
HA Zigbee is the easiest to set up. You just plug in the stick and add the Zigbee integration (usually this is even auto-discovered).
Zigbee2MQTT is slightly harder to set up, but still very doable. It supports a wider range of Zigbee devices, although Philips Hue lamps (or any not-too-obscure Zigbee device) should not be a problem on either HA or Z2M.
Depends on the device. I originally had ZHA setup with a HUSBZB and had issues with Ikea devices. I upgraded to the Sonoff S3 Zigbee stick and while doing that moved over to Zigbee2MQTT. Things seem to be working better but that may have just been from the stick upgrade. I’d say ZHA is more user friendly but Z2M isn’t that difficult to learn/set up either.