Searching for a Zigbee hub

[Xorinzor]

Hey all,

 

I have some ideas I'd like to try out that utilize the Zigbee protocol.

For this, I'm looking for a reliable Zigbee hub/gateway that I can connect to my network (similar concept to the Philips Hue hub, which I also have).

 

Have any of you ever purchased / used one of these, and what is your experience with them? Got any recommendations or things to keep in mind?

I find privacy / security quite important, so if a device continually tries to ping home, that's a no-no for me (although I could block the requests in my firewall, but I'd rather not if I don't have to). Local-network only would be ideal.

[GDRRiley]

I've used some back when I worked with an audio and electrical engineer. about 1-2 years ago most were bad and at least 1 company was pulling the you now need pay for the cloud to do everything.

all of it sucked

[Dujith]

Zigbee is just a protocol for wireless communication. Its open for anyone to use, like you said Philips HUE uses it. But also solar panel inverters to communicate with each other. Ect.

Its so open you can just build your own gateway with a computer or PI if you want it stand alone.

The only thing you need is a Zigbee USB Dongle (even think there are Zigbee hats for the PI)

[Xorinzor]

Just now, Dujith said:

Zigbee is just a protocol for wireless communication. Its open for anyone to use, like you said Philips HUE uses it. But also solar panel inverters to communicate with each other. Ect.

Its so open you can just build your own gateway with a computer or PI if you want it stand alone.

The only thing you need is a Zigbee USB Dongle (even think there are Zigbee hats for the PI)

I'm aware of that, unfortunately Philips doesn't allow things like Buttons to connect to the Hue Bridge because they want people to use their own proprietary stuff.

Using the Pi could be an option, but wouldn't be as polished as having a device purposely made for it (which I'd prefer).

[Dujith]

1 minute ago, Xorinzor said:

I'm aware of that, unfortunately Philips doesn't allow things like Buttons to connect to the Hue Bridge because they want people to use their own proprietary stuff.

Using the Pi could be an option, but wouldn't be as polished as having a device purposely made for it (which I'd prefer).

You dont have to. In the Philips Hue Bridge you can create a key. With that key you can use their API and switch whatever you want within their eco system.

They have alot of documentation on how: https://developers.meethue.com/

Its how i made a python plugin doing just that.

[Xorinzor]

2 minutes ago, Dujith said:

You dont have to. In the Philips Hue Bridge you can create a key. With that key you can use their API and switch whatever you want within their eco system.

They have alot of documentation on how: https://developers.meethue.com/

Its how i made a python plugin doing just that.

That's not the goal of my project though, so unfortunately I can't use that.

[Dujith]

9 minutes ago, Xorinzor said:

That's not the goal of my project though, so unfortunately I can't use that.

I'm not sure what u want then. If you want a slick interface.. well the builds for PI or pc are pretty slick  And you can add HUE products to them

(depending on Zigbee version)

Otherwise you'll get a vendor specific hub with other brands locked out. Thera are many custom firmwares around for the

Zigbee sticks that will allow HUE lamps to connect.

 

But you are being very vague with what u want todo. As said with the API (since you have a HUE hub)

you can pretty much do anything with their lights. Or hack a custom sollution. 

There is no 1 wonder sollution as everyone uses the Zigbee communication in a different way and wyou need need to speak that way.

 

Again, Zigbee is just communication method. How you use that communication is down to each user/vendor and they are not compatible

with eachother. Its much closer to a Wifi mesh network then something like KNX.

[Xorinzor]

1 minute ago, Dujith said:

I'm not sure what u want then. If you want a slick interface.. well the builds for PI or pc are pretty slick  And you can add HUE products to them

(depending on Zigbee version)

Otherwise you'll get a vendor specific hub with other brands locked out. Thera are many custom firmwares around for the

Zigbee sticks that will allow HUE lamps to connect.

 

But you are being very vague with what u want todo. As said with the API (since you have a HUE hub)

you can pretty much do anything with their lights. Or hack a custom sollution. 

There is no 1 wonder sollution as everyone uses the Zigbee communication in a different way and wyou need need to speak that way.

 

Again, Zigbee is just communication method. How you use that communication is down to each user/vendor and they are not compatible

with eachother. Its much closer to a Wifi mesh network then something like KNX.

 

I named the Philips Hue bridge just as an example  
One of my goals is for example to press a physical button, which will start up a VM. For that I need the zigbee protocol, for which the Hue API will do me no good.

[Dujith]

1 minute ago, Xorinzor said:

 

I named the Philips Hue bridge just as an example  
One of my goals is for example to press a physical button, which will start up a VM. For that I need the zigbee protocol, for which the Hue API will do me no good.

Zigbee is not a protocol, its a way like bluetooth and wifi to talk to eachother. You will still need to speak the language of each device.

Whatever button you will get you will still need a gateway to translate this to whatever script you want to run.

You can plugin the USB Zigbee stick in your server that runs the VM and some software (Like OpenHab or many others like that) can run the script.

[Xorinzor]

1 minute ago, Dujith said:

Zigbee is not a protocol, its a way like bluetooth and wifi to talk to eachother. You will still need to speak the language of each device.

Whatever button you will get you will still need a gateway to translate this to whatever script you want to run.

You can plugin the USB Zigbee stick in your server that runs the VM and some software (Like OpenHab or many others like that) can run the script.

That's not what I meant. But this is going quite off-topic at this point.

I'm just looking for a consumer-ready device that I can plug in to my network that will function as a bridge similar to the Philips Hue Bridge.

Ideally I don't want to hack together one of these bridges myself.

[Lurick]

Why not combine HomeAssistant with some scripts instead?

home-assistant.io

 

That would act as the intermediary and could launch a script to start a VM and you could setup a trigger if a button is pressed.

[Lurick]

Just now, Xorinzor said:

That's not what I meant. But this is going quite off-topic at this point.

I'm just looking for a consumer-ready device that I can plug in to my network that will function as a bridge similar to the Philips Hue Bridge.

Ideally I don't want to hack together one of these bridges myself.

Those don't exist to do what you want. Amazon used to have their button things but they were discontinued afaik

[Xorinzor]

Just now, Lurick said:

Why not combine HomeAssistant with some scripts instead?

home-assistant.io

 

That would act as the intermediary and could launch a script to start a VM and you could setup a trigger if a button is pressed.

Because I still need a way for the physical button to communicate wirelessly with a bridge / hub.

[Xorinzor]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Those don't exist to do what you want. Amazon used to have their button things but they were discontinued afaik

That's not true, xiaomi has one, and Samsung has their Smartthings hub. I'm just looking if anyone else has any recommendations / experiences with devices.

[Dujith]

1 minute ago, Xorinzor said:

That's not what I meant. But this is going quite off-topic at this point.

I'm just looking for a consumer-ready device that I can plug in to my network that will function as a bridge similar to the Philips Hue Bridge.

Ideally I don't want to hack together one of these bridges myself.

This is not offtopic. There is no universal Zigbee bridge.. What u want does not exists as Zigbee is NOT a protocol but a communication method.

Whatever bridges there are, are vendor specific and for their application. As they use their own way to talk to their products.

 

3 minutes ago, Xorinzor said:

That's not true, xiaomi has one, and Samsung has their Smartthings hub. I'm just looking if anyone else has any recommendations / experiences with devices.

And there is my point. They all use Zigbee as a communication, but are incompatible with eachother.

 

Whatever button you will pick you will need to get the vendors hub or make one yourself.

[Kilrah]

Zigbee is the RF standard, but it does "nothing" on its own. On top of that is a protocol layer that is different for each manufacturer.

Basically either you use an off the shelf system that has an API you can use, but I don't know of any that will work without their cloud services, or you get yourself the RF interface and build your own thing.

There might be systems you can reflash with open source firmware you have more control of, but those I looked at all used wifi on ESP chips rather than Zigbee.

[Xorinzor]

3 hours ago, Dujith said:

This is not offtopic. There is no universal Zigbee bridge.. What u want does not exists as Zigbee is NOT a protocol but a communication method.

Whatever bridges there are, are vendor specific and for their application. As they use their own way to talk to their products.

 

And there is my point. They all use Zigbee as a communication, but are incompatible with eachother.

 

Whatever button you will pick you will need to get the vendors hub or make one yourself.

It is off-topic in the sense that I am just asking for help finding a hub / gateway that allows for Zigbee devices to connect, no more, no less.

Although I appreciate the explanation on Zigbee, I'm not looking for help in how to make any of my projects work. I'm perfectly capable of figuring that out myself (and already have some plans on how to handle that, I'm well familiar with programming and IT systems).

 

The aforementioned home-assistant for example is capable of communicating with most bridges/hubs out there, which works perfectly fine for my needs.

 

37 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

Ikea's Tradfri hub is Zigbee-compliant (i have one right now). it accepts zigbee devices and are all controlled on in-app, but there's this really dumb downside where on iOS, the tradfri hub only shows Ikea devices on Apple Homekit control ._.

Thanks! Looks like a good suggestion

[Dujith]

@Xorinzor That Ikea device will only work with Ikea devices and some HUE ones.

As far as other products its hit and miss, again for the same reason we stated before.

 

The most "universal" box seems to be the Xiaomi MiHome Gateway and has an active community.

Nevermind its Xiaomi and Ikea only supported, other devices "might" work.

[Xorinzor]

8 minutes ago, Dujith said:

@Xorinzor That Ikea device will only work with Ikea devices and some HUE ones.

As far as other products its hit and miss, again for the same reason we stated before.

 

The most "universal" box seems to be the Xiaomi MiHome Gateway and has an active community.

Hm okay, well then I'll just dig a bit deeper before deciding on which to buy

[Dujith]

2 minutes ago, Xorinzor said:

Hm okay, well then I'll just dig a bit deeper before deciding on which to buy

Best bet is still the USB stick. As its vendor agnostic and usually a good community around it. Like the conbee https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2/compatible

No cloud just local goodness.

[Kilrah]

40 minutes ago, Xorinzor said:

The aforementioned home-assistant for example is capable of communicating with most bridges/hubs out there, which works perfectly fine for my needs.

You said 

 

4 hours ago, Xorinzor said:

if a device continually tries to ping home, that's a no-no for me

But that is what all of these commercial solutions do. Home Assistant does not connect straight to your Zigbee devices locally, everything goes through the various providers' systems.

 

You can turn on a Hue light with a Xiaomi button through Home Assistant, but you need both the Hue gateway and the Xiaomi gateway plus your server, the button will talk to the xiaomi gateway, which will talk to xiaomi cloud, which will ping your HA server, which will tell Hue cloud you want your light on, which will ping your Hue gateway and do that.

 

To satisfy your requirement of running locally you have to use a solution like @Dujith pointed out.

[Xorinzor]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

You said 

 

But that is what all of these commercial solutions do. Home Assistant does not connect straight to your Zigbee devices locally, everything goes through the various providers' systems.

 

You can turn on a Hue light with a Xiaomi button through Home Assistant, but you need both the Hue gateway and the Xiaomi gateway plus your server, the button will talk to the gateway, which will talk to xiaomi cloud, which will ping your HA server, which will tell Hue cloud you want your light on, which will ping your Hue gateway and do that.

 

To satisfy your requirement of running locally you have to use a solution like @Dujith pointed out.

That's not entirely true, the philips Hue bridge works perfectly fine offline with other apps, no cloud needed.
But the Hue bridge also allows for Ikea bulbs to connect, as well as several other zigbee products, thus there are probably products out there which have more global support for zigbee devices, and can also be controlled via HA.

Anyway, I just ended up purchasing the ConBee 2, given that my server is in a rack anyway it will be fine that way. Not the most elegant solution, but it'll do.