Contemplating adding a SkyConnect Zigbee dongle to our Home Assistant. Seems to be pretty ok, or at least as reliable as Zigbee in general gets. Initially just a couple of basic Aqara sensors to test with. Anything larger will need routers/repeaters for better reach.
@chakie I have a SkyConnect, still with the Zigbee only firmware.
Used it for a bit with ZHA, but later added Mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT. I needed MQTT anyway, because my RTL-SDR monitoring my 433 MHz Thermometer send their date into MQTT. And then I tried ZB2MQTT and liked it a bit better than ZHA. All entities still already automatically in HA. But the GUI is just better than ZHA's.
@holgerschurig I’ve seen that people prefer that over ZHA. Not exactly sure how it works though. It gets the Z data and then shoves it into Mosquitto from which another part of HA gets it? Sounds a bit complicated? We do have a Mosquitto running already for some other stuff so setup would be easy.
@chakie It might sound complicated, but you as a user won't notice the complication.
The benefit of ZB2MQTT is that it supports way more devices than ZHA. And that they even have a database of supported devices. Together with hints on how to pair them (e.g. what buttons to press how often, or how long, to start the pairing process).
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