Zigbee at Home
I want to use and run many small battery sensors across the home. Wifi would have worked, but battery-powered sensors make them portable and usable. Also, I would like to keep small sensors out of my wifi network for security reasons.
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Zigbee is made for small devices in a local network and is an open standard wireless connection. There are a ton of affordable products that are available and work quite well. I use Sonoff products. Sonoff is a Chinese brand that makes affordable home IoT products. Most of their products are hackable or reflashable, making them very DIY-friendly. The quality, in my experience, has been good, and the community around their products is huge. I usually use Tasmota (firmware) and Home Assistant ( manage and automate). Sonoff products play pretty well with these two software tools.
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So I got a SONOFF Zigbee Bridge Pro, which looks like a small travel router. Then flashed it with Tasmota by following the tutorial by digiblurDIY. I had to open the package and solder some wires, but it wasn't a big deal as all the points were labeled very well on the PCB, and there was enough place to solder. Since I didn't have enough wire, I soldered some old resistor leads; post flashing left a part of the lead on the board just in case I had to use it again. But then it didn't happen as the Tasmota can be upgraded over the air. Then I connected it to wifi and attached it to Home Assistant using ZHA, which comes with Home Assistant. Just make sure your Tasmota Sonoff Zigbee Bridge uses a static IP, so your connection to HA is stable even if you restart the bridge.
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Once your bridge is up and connected, you can add sensors one by one using the Home Assistant dashboard., It doesn't take more than a minute to count. After that, you can set up your alerts or automation. My HA is connected to local InfluxDB to store the data for long-term archival and reporting. I used InfluxDB's built-in reporting system to see those charts.
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It's been almost six months, and the setup has been relatively stable. I am happy about the setup and will continue to add more sensors.
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