I discovered the zigate gateway. It is a Zigbee gateway that allows controling many Zigbee products from different companies (Philips, Ikea, Xiaomi, …) with a local control (no need to cloud connection).
It looks like a similar product to the Raspbee/Conbee products for which an openHAB binding already exists.
We also have the Zigbee binding that is compatible with few Zigbee dongles but maybe not compatible with the same Zigbee devices.
The zigate product proposes a full open API. One model requires a serial connection, another one is accessible through Wifi.
I would like to know if there is any interest in the community for a binding supporting the Zigbee devices through this gateway ?
I have not yet evaluated the amount of work to develop such a binding but could be interested to do it.
Personally, I would recommend putting effort into adding any missing features to the current ZigBee binding than starting another.
What features are you missing? The binding in general is device independant - it works by discovering devices features, and only needs support for specific devices where the device doesn’t comply with standards. I suspect that where a device doesn’t comply with standards, it will also not work with such a box, and then getting it added may be difficult.
Of course the ZigBee binding doesn’t do everything - it misses converters for a number of clusters (ie device types) and these need to be added. I tend to focus on the needs of the commercial customers, but if there is a request for a specific device type, and someone wants to send me a device to test again, I’m generally happy to add such support.
It would be great if the zigate could be added as a coordinator to the existing binding bu I’m not sure if it’s possible, I am not familiar with how the binding works nor the zigate (I’ve looked a bit to make a nodeJS script to work with it, but the documentation is not very clear).
It would mostly benefit the french users as zigate is sold in France, but if it can’t be added to the existing binding, another binding would be nice as for the moment I cannot use my zigate and I don’t want to install another HA software just to use as a bridge.
Yes, the best would be to get Zigate supported by ZigBee binding.
I got in touch a few months ago with the person behind Zigate and he at that time did not have other requests to support Openhab, but he is happy to help anyone who wants to adapt/develop a binding.
He can be reached via the form a the end of the home page of his site.
And before someone asks :-), I don’t have the needed background to look at this myself…
Hi, I recently deployed OpenHab in my house and already have a bunch of things talking with the server using rfxcom and z-wave.
I bought a ZiGate usb stick knowing it wasn’t supported by OpenHab. I’m currently able (using a telnet console and a bit a of time and paper to build the hex chain) to send working commands to the stick and to translate the answer(s) (tested with a innr rgb lightbulb).
So I’d like to start working on adding the support of the USB ZiGate to the existing ZigBee binding.
I forked the github repo and I’m currently trying to understand how the other ZigBee sticks are implemented.
-EDIT - Looks like I’ll have to fork the Z-Smart Systems library first ^^
