Does OpenHAB work with XBee?

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

as title, anyone test it before with XBee on RPi2?

2

Zigbee support is in progress in OH2. Other XBee families are not directly supported.

However, as with most questions along these lines, XBee only provides the radio transport and does not define the format and form of the actual messages. It’s like asking whether OH supports 802.11n. Sure it does if you have an 802.11n wifi device plugged into your computer but that tells you nothing about whether OH can actually properly format or decode the actual messages that would be sent.

Thus, as with any other similar technology, you will need some sort of device to plug into your OH computer (e.g. a USB dongle) and a binding that is able to send and receive messages via that dongle. So in truth, the actual support for XBee is implemented in the dongle, not OH. The OH support is actually implementing the ability for OH to talk to this dongle.

1 Like
3

Have a look at New binding for home made hardware

4

thanks for the link, since it’s a fork project, I don’t want to fall into problems, better wait until XBee communication have native support on OH first.

5

I understand, as long as OH could communicate with hardware, it should be fine.

But, why no one implement ZigBee communication section to OpenHAB? It doesn’t sound too difficult to me.

6

You are free to help with the effort. From what I’ve read it us significantly more difficult than zwave was. Like I said, talking to the radios is only a small part of the problem.

7

The pull request is already filed. I hope my plugin will go into upstream.

8

When do you think it will go into upstream? Thanks for your contribution, I think it opens up more opportunity for me as I am located in Hong Kong, running Z-Wave is a headache choice as I need to support multiple frequency from different regions which doesn’t sound efficient at all, so ZigBee will provide more variety of hardware to choose from anywhere around the world. Thanks again.

9

As mentioned above, this is being added for OH2.

Really :wink:. A simple XBee communication might be easy, but a full ZigBee stack is not trivial I’m afraid to say…

10

If it were so simple to have interoperable Zigbee stack and devices you would see them all over the place on the market. Zigbee has been around for a long time, but has trouble taking off because of all of these challenges; which have absolutely nothing to do with OpenHAB.

As Rich mentioned; XBee is not ZigBee.