Athom Zigbee Gateway setup

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

Hi,

I have got a Athom Zigbee Gateway with preflashed Tasmota that I have not used before.
Here is it’s description:

Support Zigbee2MQTT ZHA
ESP32-WROOM-32E
CC2652 P2
200+ Zigbee sub devices
10/100M Ethernet
CH340C Built in easy to flash ESP32 and communicates with Zigbee
Support TCP and Serial Port
​
Pre flashed Zigbee 3.0 Coordinator firmware

I also have some Aquara sensors that were working with their Xiaomi Gateway 3 Gateway while on OH3.

After upgrading to OH4, I wanted to check if I can manage to move these sensors to this Athom Zigbee Gateway.

After spending a couple of hours I couldn’t manage to do the job and still can’t wrap my head around how it should be set up. My setup:

  • The gateway is connected via the Ethernet cable.
  • I can see the Tasmota web interface.
  • I can telnet to 8888 port.

What I know so far. Please correct me if something is not right.

  1. Zigbee2Mqtt from openhabian cannot be installed as it’s working with the local USB devices only.

  2. I think I can install Zigbee2Mqtt manually, but not sure if I need to connect OpenHab and Zigbee2MQTT later together.

  3. Other points:

  • Do I need to setup a serial over tcp like it says here? I think I can manage to use OpenHabian for the installation in this case.

  • If so - how can I find the correct path to the adaptor (here)?

  • On the Athom website someone wrote this comment:

Configuration settings are as follows : data_path: /config/zigbee2mqtt socat: enabled: true master: pty,raw,echo=0,link=/tmp/ttyZ2M,mode=777 slave: tcp-listen:8888,keepalive,nodelay,reuseaddr,keepidle=1,keepintvl=1,keepcnt=5 options: “-d -d” log: true mqtt: {} serial: port: tcp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8888 (the IP address you give the gateway) Hope this helps someone.

But I am not sure where this configuration should be used.

  1. OpenHab Zigbee binding and Zigbee2MQTT things are completely different things and must not be mixed together.
  2. I tried to use the OpenHab Zigbee connection by writing socket://[ip]:8888 to the serial port, but I am sure this is not correct :slight_smile:
  3. Hopefully, after somehow installing Zigbee2MQTT the autodiscovery magic will kick it and I will manage to pair and find the devices in the UI. I havend’t thought about this yet.

I appreciate any thoughts on the topic.

  • Platform information:
    • Hardware: PI 4
    • OS: Linux 11 (bullseye) by openhabian
    • Java Runtime Environment: 17
    • openHAB version: 4.0.3
2

ZigBee devices can only be added to one network at the same time.

You need to differentiate between connecting a ZigBee device to a gateway and integrating the gateway into OH. Two separate things.

You can either connect a ZigBee device to a controller managed by openhab ZigBee binding, to a controller managed by zigbee2mqtt or to any other 3rd party gateway like your athom gateway, philips hue, Ikea tradif, etc… but it’s only one controller/gateway/hub at a time (however you want to name it).

It’s out of OH control how to add, manage, remove devices from your network. Only if you use the OH ZigBee binding OH will manage devices.

Once you have added a zigbee device to your gateway the next question is how your gateway can be integrated into OH, that’s interdependent of ZigBee and depending on the capabilities of the gateway.

The OH zigbee binding is already integrated as a binding.
Zigbee2mqtt is integrated via mqtt
Philips hue has its own binding
If your hub runs tasmota, you can most likely also use mqtt or any other api access provided by tasmota

3

Thank you! Now it makes sense to me.
I do not need OpenHab ZigBee binding if I go with Zigbee2mqtt as all the setup I will do via MQTT.

If I go with OpenHab Zigbee binding - how to setup a connection to a ZigBee controller via ethernet, so the binding can talk to it? I understand that I need to do something to allow the binding to use a local connection (/dev/xxx) that will somehow tunnel everything to the ZigBee controller.
Does ser2net and this topic looks like an answer then?

4

Normally the zigbee coordinate is locally connected to the OH server.

That’s beyond my skills if/how you can make OH think that this device is connected locally

5

Thanks everyone for your help!

Just an update with the result.
I installed Zigbee2MQTT app to a separate Raspberry PI.

During the configuration I set the network device port to tcp://x.x.x.x:8888. That was enough for Zigbee2MQTT to connect to Athom Gigbee Gateway and start the communication.

I also turned on Home Assistant integration in Zigbee2MQTT settings - it helped with AutoDiscovery of all added things in openHAB.