Hi everyone,

I am reading up on that topic for a few weeks now and the only conclusion I have so far is: There is nothing that works perfect and you need to check for each device if it works with your setup.

So I am asking about your experience so far, what you use, if you plan to change your setup (for what reason?) or what you would do different. Or do you use multiple gateways / protocols at the same time?

I run HA in Docker for a few things, but I have nothing connected yet via one of the protocols mentioned above. Yesterday I came across SkyConnect and thought I found the holy grail of dongles. Zigbee? Check. Zigbee2MQTT? Check. Matter? Check. But then looking at the details… Zigbee2MQTT is experimental and in a few review (although none was younger than 9 months) people report that it works unreliable. Matter support also is not there yet it seems. And to add insult to insury it seems that it officially does not work with a Dockerized HA setup.

So whenever I think I found “my” solution, there is something that does not seem to work, is unreliable or not compatible with all devices. I even ran across reports that said if a device Support Zigbee or MQTT it might still not work with your particular setup because… well… not everything that has a specific protocol stamped on the package seem to work in the same way.

So I feel like running in circles. I wanted to start with a few simple things like Temperature / Humidity sensors and Door sensors like for example the ones from Aqara. But if I throw money at someone my highest priority is reliability. So I want to go a route that (at this moment) is the most stable, reliable and future proof in your opinion.

So I am very curious about your setups and the experience you made with it :-)

  • @[email protected]English
    9•1 year ago

    HA matter support is still BETA

    Matter supporting devices are still VERY few and far between (some vendors have back tracked from supporting it)

    I am not even considering matter an important feature until HA is out of beta for it, it cant even act as a matter bridge yet. This is particularly important if you want HA to be the master of everything and you want to use matter with other systems directly.

    For now my setup is all self run docker… I run the main HA container, zigbee2mqtt for zigbee support, and zwave-js in a docker for zwave support.

    By far zwave has the most mature lock / security / control devices

    By far zigbee has the MOST / cheapest sensors and other devices (Aqara in particular for sensors)

    I would love to consolidate but I am in a complete rebuild of my setup and from the look of it most of my door locks will be going zwave and nearly all my sensors will be Aqara zigbee.

    As for which way to go with zibee, I started with ZHA then switched to zigbee2mqtt for a few reasons

    1. zigbee2mqtt has slightly better device support, seems to get device support a litter faster for new strange devices and has a great online database of supported devices.
    2. zha restarts with HA, this includes restarting the zigbee dongle AND NETWORK… every time to do a full restart of HA you may cause all your zigbee devices to become unavailable till the network comes back up, particularly sensors. Running zigbee2mqtt as a separate docker it only ever gets restarted when I reload it for updates, the network is always VAST and up. When I restart HA the only wait is for HA to connect to MQTT and bang all the devices are back with the correct states
    3. Feedback… zha has a better UI integration IN HA, however I found using the native zigbee2mqtt webUI it had more real-time feedback for actions such as inclusion, or advanced stuff like binding devices together which requires some odd timing of you pressing device buttons.
    4. zigbee2mqtt was very tunable, from setting up the keys / channels to how often it polls to find out if battery devices have gone missing.
    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you very much, that was very helpful! I am leaning towards Zigbee2MQTT and it seems to be a good choice.

      ZHA is out of question now, since how often I have to restart HA for updates, I am sure it would be annoying to me. My Mosquitto Instance however does not receive updates as frequent, so Z2M might be the better choice for me.

      Could you tell me what kind of Bridge / Device / Dongle you use? I often read Conbee II**, but this is not on the recommended list for Z2M. On the other hand I am thinking about getting a Network only Gateway (there are some on the recommended list too), so I do not rely on a USB connection that needs to be mapped to a Docker Container. Having pure Network connections and independent devices sounds like a more stable solution. Also I assume having a Networked Gateway instead of a USB connected one would be independent of restarts from my Containers or even the host.

      **Edit: It IS on the Recommended list, I just got confused because it is not listed on the USB section, but under Other :-)