How to get started with Zigbee in Sonoff / eWelink

welcome to a new video in my home automation series and today i'm going to review sonoff products again and this is going to be the review of the son of zigbee bridge but besides the simple review of the zigbee bridge this is going to be the introductory video on how the zigbee network works within sonoff and up until now the devices that we usually use for example the 4ch and the 4ch pro and of course the basic and the tx and most of the other models they communicated directly to the wi-fi network so they have a wi-fi chip inside and they talk directly to your internet router and then they talk to the cloud services and then via that you can also control them over your phone and this is fine for devices that are usually hooked up to the mains as well because wi-fi consumes a little bit more power than what a battery operated device can do and this was one of the other reason why their other video protocols started to emerge especially for you know simple sensor devices if you look at the sample sensors that i was given we have a motion sensor a touch sensor there is a humidity and temperature sensor a door open switch they usually don't have to send a lot of data through for example uh definitely not as much as your mobile phone so they can operate on a radio communication which uses much less power and is designed to send much less power and this is how zigbee came along zigbee is not the only pro communication protocol but this is the one which is probably the most widely used and it has a couple of features which makes it a little bit more superior than the regular 433 megahertz devices that i uh previewed previously and by the way since i mentioned 433 the 433 devices they also require a bridge which looks almost same as this one they just have the different colors so that was called the rf bridge so now we need a zigbee bridge in order to use any zigbee devices as i mentioned you need a zigbee bridge so this zigbee bridge communicates to the or connects to the wifi and all these zigbee devices communicate with the zigbee bridge so this is how the communication between the mobile phone and your zigbee devices are established they all go through the zigbee bridge what i'm planning to do in this video is i'm going to show you how you set up the zigbee bridge how you can add devices to the zigbee bridge and then in a future video i'm going to cover each of these sensors separately so i can talk about the features of them and how you would use in the evening application how you would link them up with other devices and by the way it's not only these four sensors they use zigbee i also have a zigbee sonoff basic which looks like a regular sonoff basic but it doesn't communicate via wi-fi this also communicates with the zigbee bridge you will receive your zigbee bridge in this white box and it will pretty much contain the device itself you're also getting a qc pass and you are also getting a small leaflet which contains the setup procedure well that's the very simple user manual and it comes in a couple of different languages so it just contains contains the very basic information about how you pair it with the evlink app and the various devices would have more information how you pair that again to the zigbee bridge very similar to the rf bridge you are only receiving the bridge itself and the bridge needs to be powered by a micro usb socket and you have to provide a micro usb charger yourself it says 5 volts 1 amp so pretty much any old phone charger is going to do as long as it has a micro usb output other than that we have a reset hole where we can reset the device and we just have two status leds and that's pretty much it that's what you get in the box after unboxing the zigbee bridge the only thing i have done is i connected to power using a 5 volt power supply i just used an old phone charger and i just needed a micro usb lead so which plugs into here and that's all you need to do once you have done that the zigbee bridge would automatically go into pairing mode and in the ev-link app you just click on plus button you select quick pairing and you follow the on-screen instructions adding the zigbee bridge to your eviling setup works exactly the same way how you would do it with any regular sonoff device and now we can see that we have a new device in our eviling setup which is called the zigbee bridge and it says that it has zero child devices and as i mentioned previously the zigbee bridge as the name suggests it's really just a bridge it doesn't do anything else it just establishes the communication between the zigbee devices and your wifi network so the zigbee bridge itself doesn't really do anything and as you can see on the screen now in the app there is no options that you can do if you go into the settings you can do a few things for example you can rename it you can move it to a different location you can share it you can influence the network indicator so this blue led and other than that you just have the device info so there is nothing here and now since we have the zigbee bridge setup now what we need to do is we need to pair the zigbee devices with the zigbee bridge similarly how we pair other sonof devices with the wifi network so i think i'm going to do this zigbee basic first so i'm here in the page where it says the zigbee bridge and ice it says no child devices please add so i'm just click going to click on add and it's going to look for child devices process is very similar so this sonoff basic is not paired with any zigbee bridge so it is in pairing mode and the green led was flashing so now the zigbee bridge is able to find that of course there is no wi-fi network here so you don't have to provide your wifi credentials you just basically say pairing and then it finds the device it says one device is found so i'm just going to click next and as you can see we have one device and if i operate it well it already works that's nice and since we are adding devices i think what i want to do now is i want to add all four devices so i can do this pairing process at the same time but i think i'm just going to edit one by one most of these devices they just have a simple tab that you have to remove most of these zigbee devices just have a paper tab which isolates the battery so the battery is not getting drained why it's in the warehouse so you just need to remove that and put the cover back on after removing the tab i also had to reset the device so i used a small pin and there is a hole on the side and there is a button inside and you just hold it for let's say about five seconds you see some blink and now we can add the device to the zigbee bridge and now the first device is found okay so i'm going to move to the next one which is this temperature sensor this has the battery tab as well well this device needs a screwdriver to pop the cover off and here you go i managed to get the cover off it has a fairly large coin cell and when you want to put the cover back on there are some arrows so it helps to align and then you know which way is which and this doesn't have a hole but it has a button on the side and if i hold the button which is on the underside after a couple of seconds you can see a few red flashes and now it is ready for pairing so i just add this device to the zigbee bridge as well the next one is going to be the door motion sensor this has a smaller battery but there is also a tab so i just remove that and then and i realigned the cover which is going to be this way and this also has a hole on the underside i just need to use the pin sideways and i can feel that i'm pushing on a small switch and hopefully after a couple of seconds here we can see the flashing and now we can add this device as well you can see that during pairing the green led flashes and finally is the touch button and the procedure is exactly the same as with the others here the uh this tab appears to be a little bit stuck let me remove the battery as well by the way with the exception of the window and the door sensors the other sensors use a more chunkier cr2450 coin cell and this is something that i i'm usually having trouble finding it because it's much less used than the other cr battery types you might want to source a few of them if you are planning to use a lot of zigbee sensors for the zigbee button the procedure is slightly different because when you remove the back cover you see that there is a reset hole here so i'm going to just hold it for five seconds or so and now we can see the blink and i can add this to my bridge as well i'm going to put the cover back on later yeah and it is added and now that we have had all five of our devices so one two three four five to the zigbee bridge we can see them on the zigbee beach page by the way i've already removed the first one to see zigbee basic and i'm just going to show you how i'm done this before so all of them are under the zigbee bridge and if i go out i don't see these devices separately but let's go in for example if i take the zigbee bridge go into the details i can operate it here so it almost looks like as the regular son of basic well there are some differences here and if i go into the settings this is where i could rename the default name that it automatically gets assigned when you do the pairing and by default these devices don't get assigned to any room because well your zigbee bridge can be in let's say in the living room but again your other devices could be in different locations around the house so what i can do now is i can come here and i can specifically assign this to the living room and if i done that okay confirmation then if i go back to my living room now i can see that my zigbee bridge is also available in the living room so they don't necessarily have to be within the zigbee bridge once you move all your devices to different rooms then you can pretty much you know forget about the zigbee bridge itself the only time you would need to come back to it if you want to pair other devices so as you can see i've moved my temperature sensor into the living room as well and i think i'm going to do with all the other devices as well and probably only also going to rename them give them a user-friendly name and i think this is probably where i'm going to end this video so now we have seen how you set up a new zigbee bridge how you can link it with your evlink application and how you can add additional devices and as i said in the beginning i'm not going to talk about these additional devices here because otherwise this video is going to be fairly long so if you want to know how you can use the motion sensor or the button or the temperature sensor well just stick around and i'm going to explain these in future videos that's all for today thanks for watching and hopefully see in the next video

Channel: Csongor Varga

Views: 28,528

Rating: 4.8364778 out of 5

Keywords: sonoff, itead, ewelink, zigbee, home automation, scenes

Id: hWxMDdh70mk

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020