I’m not sure whether this is the right section to post my question, but it seems like this is the most general section for these kind of questions.
I’ve got a USB dongle with zigbee2mqtt working just fine, however, adding devices to the dongle via the CLI is a pain in the butt. Especially since I’m installing this system at my parents house whom do not have any knowledge about Linux or anything like that.
I’m looking for an easy to setup universal Zigbee HUB which is compatible with openHAB and is connected to your local network. I do not want a USB dongle connected to the local openHAB server. I prefer devices to be added to the hub via a mobile phone app. Is there anything like this? I can only find USB Dongles which still require me to use commands to add a device to openHAB.
You can even make this available via google home and tell Google Assistant to “Turn on Zigbee Permission” or whatever you’d like to call it. It would make it super easy to add new devices.
Thanks for your suggestion! I did find some information about permit_join, but will this item allow me to discover the new Zigbee devices using the openHAB GUI only, or would it still require my parents to add the devices manually to the .things and the .items file?
Also, what is the difference between enabling the permit_join option in the configuration.yaml and creating an item in openHAB?
permit_join is only to allow a new zigbee device to join your zigbee network. It has nothing to do with openhab.
You will still need to add the thing and item into openhab after that, either via gui or via config file. Then after that, you’d need to incorporate them into your rules, either by way of group membership or specific rules just for that device.
Yes and no, the tag should be “zigbee” because this question is not directly related to zigbee2mqtt, I still prefer a different and easier solution instead of zigbee2mqtt.
It makes it a lot easier, absolutely. I will definitely look into this if there is no easier solution which won’t require me to manually add the devices to openHAB. I prefer an automatic detection method like Philips Hue bulbs, for example.
For “automatic detection” you could use the home assistant method (homeassistant: true) in the z2mqtt config which should enable auto-discovery in OH.
You would still need to add channels/items though.
Also take into account that it might change your mqtt structure.
I’m gonna try the permit_join option with the openHAB zigbee binding, perhaps using the home assistant method in z2mqtt. Thanks a lot for the assistance!
I use the HUSBZB-1 USB Hub. I currently have 3 of them on remote servers covering my house and all my outside gates. Even monitoring my mailbox. They are about $40 on Amazon. I use them on RPI. The Zigbee binding works well with these. I configured it just like in the OH docs.