I said in a previous post that I had been getting into Home Assistant/automation and you should expect more posts – and here is the first!
Baby Steps
My introduction to home automation was, like many others I suspect, via the IKEA TRÅDFRI range of blubs and plugs. In order for these to work you needed a hub which joined them all together and allowed you to control them via an app. These devices all worked over the Zigbee protocol and worked well. Then, IKEA took the decision to discontinue the TRÅDFRI range and replace them new devices using the Matter protocol. This didn’t affect the usability of the devices but it was clear that IKEA’s focus was now going to be elsewhere.
In addition to these IKEA devices, I also began to get a collection of others from manufacturers such as Tapo and Shelly, but they didn’t quite work in symphony as I might have liked.
Enter Home Assistant
I had a Raspberry Pi 4B lying around, as you do, a casualty of another aborted project and I realised that I could use it to host my own instance of Home Assistant (HA) and begin to unify all my devices.
One thing that I wanted to do was to simplify my setup and to have everything working via HA and so this meant that the TRÅDFRI hub had to go. As previously mentioned all the IKEA devices I have are Zigbee and I knew that HA could manage these with the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1. The ZBT-1 is a USB dongle produced by Nabu Casa, the commercial arm of the otherwise open source Home Assistant.
I ordered one and plugged it in and it was immediately recognised by HA – it was beautifully easy. Next I had to go around every Zigbee device, remove them from the IKEA hub, reset them and then re-add them to HA. Apart from being time consuming this was very straightforward too. Then I added a couple of Zigbee soil moisture detectors that I have and while they were detected and added there wasn’t any sign of the moisture entity… Odd I thought.
Zigbee2MQTT
It was at this point that I did the research that I should have done before I bought the ZBT-1. It turns out that while it is beautifully simple to use it doesn’t support every device and so I found I was missing as a minimum:
- the soil moisture information
- firmware updates for the IKEA devices.
Oops!
A quick search brought me to Zigbee2MQTT “an open source project that allows you to use Zigbee devices with MQTT-compatible home automation solutions” of which HA is one. Sadly, this meant a change of dongle so out went the ZBT-1 and in came a SONOFF Universal Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle.
Setup of Zigbee2MQTT is nowhere near as simple as the ZBT-1, which is basically plug and play, as you need to go through the installation of both MQTT and Zigbee2MQTT, but it is well documented and once up and running seems pretty stable.
Once installed I then had to go through the process of reinstalling all the devices but once I had done so I could immediately see that the moisture entity for the soil monitors were there so that was a step forward.
I guess the moral of this story is caveat emptor and do your research before taking the plunge.