New to this and openhab2 seems the way forward for me. I have it working and dry tested with Mqtt publish and receive commands.
Will be adding sensors and lights and relays and I’m sure you’ll all agree that the choice can be overwhelming. I’ve succesfully played with temperature and relay sensors using arduino and the mqtt protocol which seems the preffered protocol.
Now i’m looking at lights e.g. phillips hue or osram rgb led. I have yet to decide how to send sensors/relays over RF… choices seem esp8266, zigbee, xbee, simple 433 RxTx etc…
then enters the lights and the need for a bridge.
My question is - Can one bridge do it all? If I buy a hue Bridge, will it play with arduino xbee devices?
Does anyone recommend the raspbee by dresden?
I don’t want to keep adding different RF bridges if one can do it all. I’m not fussy about what to use for my sensors and relays but I will require Phillips Hue or Osram or similar to work in my home setup too…
No there’s no bridge to do it all. If you want to use all of these protocols, better put RF hardware into your server running openhab (a Z-Wave USB stick, an EnOcean USB stick, a CUL a.k.a. 433MHz RF receiver), and well, and maybe a hue bridge, as there’s no zigbee stick or binding in OH.
A better idea would be to drop the idea of using ZigBee. Z-Wave is fine, MQTT is, even 433MHz HW/bindings are available, and not to mention all the wired choices.
Yes - either one will hopefully work. Currently it’s the CC2531 but I also have the ASH/EZSP protocol used by the EM35x coded so both should be supported.
However I don’t think there are any EM35x devices available commercially with firmware already programmed are there? Silabs don’t have one (as far as I know), and the CEL stick doesn’t come with firmware programmed. Programming the CEL stick is quick and easy - but the programmer isn’t readily available (I did think of offering to program sticks, but this could get time consuming ).
If you know of a stick already programmed with the NCP firmware that is commercially available, I’d really love to know…
Please note that CEL has another dongle based on same chip, but cannnot be flashed using python script and it needs hardware flasher. Both dongles looks exactly same, so make sure to order correct one.
I have the other CEL dongle that needs the hardware loader (I have the full EM35x development kit). When I discussed this with CEL they said they didn’t have one that could be easily loaded and I’d not come across this one.
In addition to ASH/EZSP protocol, one can use socket.io based interface provided by this virtual gateway. The user guide provides API details, though it may not expose entire ASH/EZSP protocol.
I guess that requires a different driver than serial io… I wouldn’t be looking to support this in the first instance at least - it assumes serial io with ASH. I would think that ASH isn’t used if socket io was used since ASH defines the async framing.
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