Sonoff Zigbee Bridge with Home Assistant using Tasmota | NO Soldering | Step by Step Guide

so what is all this crap well we're doing the zigbee no let's not and say we did what is all this crap well we're doing the sonoff zigbee bridge with just less pieces let's check it out [Music] so now that we've separated most of this this is going to be all of your sensors or your endpoints basically what you're trying to read or control so that's all going to be the same so we won't be doing any of this we did show this on the live stream node mcu with a zigbee adapter and an antenna this is the same little adapters except it does have a stronger rf front end on them and you do get the antennas with them and again you would have to use like a nodemcu or a wemos d1 mini or something and make your own case etc type thing then there's this little guy the little all-in-one usb chipset that you just plug in and use with zha which is kind of like what this is but the range sucks on this one so didn't really like this one and again no case don't even have an antenna connector and it doesn't have a case i don't really get this one but whatever then this is one i've had for a while this is zigbee and z-wave plus i have gotten rid of z-wave plus since i have had several issues with interference and again the range sucks on this one debugger that you use with these and of course we won't be doing all of this yeah i know this is the diy channel but sometimes easy is just the way to go this comes in a case ready to go just with a simple usb power plug on it and you can just toss it in the middle of your house it is wi-fi that was the big plus to me that i could place this anywhere in the house and start and create my zigbee network instead of having to tie it to the home assistant server or whatever it might be and then having to pass usb ports and pass serial ports into vms and docker containers and yeah your eyes just glaze over this is all using tcp straight into home assistant and it's pretty simple to do no sonoff didn't send me any sensors really to use with this unfortunately but it isn't locked to just sewn off sensors i've used it with the aquaria or the xiaomi little temperature and humidity and pressure sensor this is some other little tuya zigbee sensor that i got that the zigbee hub was junk and this is another two-year little door sensor it works well with it again it went with the hub that was junk that we got rid of this is the aquarium one this is the sonoff s31 this is going to be considered as a router but we're going to go over that later don't let those terms confuse you like you do with some of the home assistant names but we just won't go there or maybe we did this is the sonoff basic zigbee one i guess this is the s31 again so and this is even a singlet led zigbee bulb and we did forget one piece of the whole thing rgb cct which is warm white and cool white led controllers with 12 and 24 volt inputs four led strips pretty cool that all this random stuff just works and i didn't it didn't have to worry about making the network work correctly and keeping a proper mesh that plug a went to plug c and to feed sensor d and i just plugged this in the middle of the house and it picked up everything i didn't have to worry about any type of mesh stuff like i did with this junk so enough my rambling we're going to put all this away and show you how easy it is to flash these sewn off zigbee bridge with tazmoto and bring it straight into home assistant and even with no mqtt what and we will not and i will say it again we will not be soldering to do the flash with this so do not where you do not need a soldering gun once you got them out just pull the bottom off there's no wires no nothing attached to it simple enough the only thing you will find i would turn this around with a usb is facing you and then you can take your screwdriver or a small spudger or something and just lift up the board because it's stuck into the usb connector just lift up the back and pull it straight out there's no wires just pulls apart and that's it there's nothing really to this thing if you're familiar with this you can probably skip past it but for the new ones it's real simple there's 3.3 volts here there's ground we need gpio0 which is general purpose input output number zero that allows us to put it into bootloader mode to flash the chip then the etx and erx that's the espt and esp rx pin and we'll use those two pins to flash the esp chip so for flashing this you need a usb ttl adapter and there are many different variations of this type of little adapter here this is the ch340 g chipset i believe there's the ftdi there's so many different ones but basically you want to use the 3v3 so do make sure your model is set to 3v3 or 3.3 not on 5 volts you don't want to use 5 volts and the pins on them are just going to be simple little dupont jumpers then you just slide them on there's no having to salt or anything or whatever and to put them into the via holes what i'd like to do is i'll take these breadboard jumpers and of course i will leave all the links down below a bunch of different types you can get so i'll use like say the orange one and i'll just take and shove the orange one into the female side of the dupont jumper and then now i have this one so we're going to do e r x and just simply push that into the hole it fits perfect orange will go to the tx here and now you have that pin connected and then basically repeat you want to do tx to rx 3v3 to 3v3 ground to ground now the gpio0 up here what i like to do in this case if you don't have a little splitter you could strip these back and tie them together or you could say for your ground once you push your ground in here basically what i do is you get this little door that you can pry up or the little clip whatever you want to call it and i'll just stick the breadboard jumper in there and it will stay put and then i'll take my ground and put it in here as well and that way now you have a kind of split in whichever way you want to do this it's all up to you this only has i know it's not pretty but as long as it works it has continuity you're only going to use it for about maybe a minute and then you're going to undo all this so once you got all your wires hooked up do verify again that you are using 3.3 volts on your particular flasher and remember rx goes to tx and then tx goes to rx and we do have all the wires hooked up and everything as you can see here and i don't have it plugged in yet because i like to do a little test just to make sure that i have the correct com port so yep you guessed it we're going to open up tasmatizer now the little test i like to do if you look at the com ports it has without it plugged in take note of which ones they are this will help you especially for the first timers that have not ever used a particular flasher on your computer this will show you if those drivers are working or not and i do get my little tones that i normally get when i plug in a usb device now i'll go ahead and hit the refresh button and you'll notice i get another com port and that's a really easy test to know if your drivers are working if you don't get an extra com port either got something shorted out or grounded out on your usb flasher your usb cable is not good or you don't have the drivers loaded correctly so in here we're going to load the latest release which is at the current time 8.4.0 and you do need to load the tasmoto-zb and that's about it just hit the tasmanize button now if you do get a crash after right after you press the button you may want to try running it as administrator so once you do see it saying writing and erasing you do know you have all the wires connected don't bump anything so just hang out sit still and once the flashing is done we are going to follow along straight up with the guide that i wrote on my blog post because we have changed that blog post several times because things just kept getting easier so always do reference that post because well we just can't change up the video very easily and it's just much easier to put in the blog post and all the commands and everything as things evolve because something actually might get even easier so at this point it does say power cycle we're not going to power cycle it because actually what we're going to do we're going to pull the wires off of it we're going to put it back in the case plug up the usb cable and then we're going to look for that access point at this point you need to pull up your wi-fi either using your phone or this very computer and look for a tasmoto dash such and such it's going to be different letters and numbers for an access point you're going to hit scan for networks and then go ahead and pick your access point just pick one of the blue access points and then you'll go ahead and type in your password and do verify that you do have the correct password by clicking the check box and make sure that it is your password right there and then once you're done just hit the save button then the access point is going to drop and you will need to look on your router for whatever ip address was given to this new device and just simply browse to it with your browser so once we're in here utas motor veterans you may want to start to jump to configuration and then go into setting up mqtt well you don't need mqtt if we're doing the zha integration now if you do want to change the hostname of what it appears on your router you can go in and set that as the topic here you may want to put something like tasmoto underscore zb bridge or something and that way it does show up on your network and you just don't see a tasmoto device and get it confused during your next device now once that's done we will need and one additional file so if you look back in the beginning which i did skip of the blog post there is this ncp uart that you do need to download and go ahead and click it and don't just right click anything and save as you do need to come over here and press the download button it's very important otherwise you'll end up with just an html page and everything's not going to work and then you're going to get mad at it and well just the domino effect continues at this point if you don't want to do it with home assistant you can download the later version of this and do the tasmoto zigbee mqtt thing which we may get into later or may another video so what you need to do is copy the text command out of the blog we'll just simply come into the console now don't worry about any of the errors that are on here we're saying this isn't supported and it's stopping and that's perfectly fine right now just don't once you paste those in hit enter give it a second and it's going to reboot now what i do find easier when doing this ota flash because it's very important that you get this ota flash we're about to flash the chipset of the zigbee radio in the bridge itself and tasmoto is going to take care of it all for us we used to do it some old way it was weird and well it's much easier and this definitely thanks theo for that so what i do is i open up another tab of the same device and what i'm going to do is you'll see behind me i'm going to go ahead and put console now it is much easier when you have two screens or you just kind of put two side by side but for the sake of the video i just don't have a lot of space to put stuff especially people watching things on phones go to firmware upgrade and you're going to send a file now that we're not going to send any bin files so you'll browse to that ncp uart file we just downloaded and go ahead and you're going to hit start upgrade now watch this window over here this is very important so we hit start upgrade and you'll notice it did successful now this bytes may be changed as versions go on but it sent the number of bytes upload done init bootloader init sync init packet sin xmd is for x modem and yeah you older guys that have been around you probably go whoa x modem yeah it's x modem that sends that chipset now we're going to be watching for x modem successful boom you see the successful message then we're good it's going to go back to the main menu and it's going to restart if you don't get that successful message do not continue because you did not flash the zigbee chipset in the radio and it's not going to work so just back up go back make sure you download the correct file and try to send it again you need that successful message and if you really get stuck there's always the discord link down below maybe we can get you helped out and we can figure out how to get that zigbee chipset flashed on your device and we'll go back into the console and again don't worry if you have any errors or anything this is going to be normal because what's happening it's trying to start the actual zigbee tasmoto integration which we didn't flash the firmware that supports that and in italics is gonna be a nice command for us and we're almost done with tasmota paste it all on the console we'll go ahead and press enter it should set some modules and it's going to restart just give it a second and the very important message you're looking for is this right here that says tcp start data port 8888 because that's the port that's going to connect from your home assistant to this bridge and for the ones that do all the crazy firewalls and blocking stuff and everything on their open source devices which is sometimes weird to me but hey whatever it's your network make sure that your home assistant can connect to this device on port 8888 gonna jump on into configuration integrations so we're going to hit the plus we're going to type in zig and get mr zigbee and for the serial path we are going to use manual and we'll hit submit it's going to ask us for our radio type we have easy sp and we'll hit submit and the serial device path if you want to do like me and just copy and paste i hate typing stuff because i end up screwing things up come here and copy the italics paste it in and do not hit enter just yet because you need to change your ip address change the ip address to your zigbee bridge and i know some of you may be thinking what if the ip address changes that's going to break my zha well absolutely so do go put a reserved ip or however you do it in your router you want to make sure this ip of this bridge never changes otherwise you have to come back in here and you have to repoint it every time your ip address changes for your zigbee bridge port speed it's going to be 115k now if you want to see the cool stuff hit submit and you can jump over and you should start to see a bunch of 2mcu from mcu all this communication back and forth and you can see it pop back and there it is success and i'm going to hit finish and now you're pretty much done if you know how to add different zigbee devices roll on so i'm going to start off i did the sonoff s31 light it doesn't have power monitoring but it's a little zigbee plug if you have a bunch of different devices that you've found that work great or maybe ones that don't work be sure and leave it down in the comments down below and of course we're all going to leave our list of ones that we found that work great and it does help out things so i do appreciate it so in the actual configuration click configure and we'll go ahead and hit the plus and that's going to allow us to add your zigbee devices and i did hold the button down for the s31 and we can go ahead and change the name to s31 there's no ok button or anything i just click off of it and you're done you can continue to add devices say such as this little two-year one and this is that aquarius sensor one we'll go ahead and hold the button down and if you get a timeout or anything just go ahead and start this little search thing over again and then put your device back in pairing mode it's not rocket science to getting these in parry mode usually all right this is the aquaria one of course to add them to your lovelace we have a little card with a special name we'll go ahead and add just a straight up entities card and we've got mr zigbee in here sewn off got the aquaria and we do get this relay for the sonoff s31 and there we are five devices and you can see this is some of the terms they talk about the coordinator and then you have zigbee routers that aren't coordinators and that thing's confusing so zigbee coordinator think of it more like your router like your wi-fi and then if you look at the sonoff s31 you'll notice its device type is a router well think of the router as more of a repeater it's going to help different devices that are past it from the coordinator and be kind of a stepping stone to create that mesh network and it's typically only going to be your devices that are on mains power because of course you want a battery device to sleep all the time you don't want it to stay up and keep relaying messages back and forth so you'll see this is an end device it's not going to be a type of router now that does lead to some of the issues that having this bridge in the middle of the house solves is because if you had to have a plug that bounces to another plug to another plug to build this mesh well what if someone unplugs that plug to i don't know plug in their phone or guest or whatever and then now they just took down all your zigbee networks somehow so i prefer the method of this where the zigbee coordinator has all of the ability to touch all the different sensors because i just don't have and i probably will not have a lot of mains powered zigbee devices because i do prefer the esp wi-fi types but for the battery hey the zigbee stuff's great you just can't get that with the wi-fi devices and that's about it pretty much covered the last little piece of my ramp on why i do like this particular zigbee bridge of being able to put it in the middle of the house don't forget share some sensors down below i like to check out all the different little zigbee sensors and what that people are doing with zigbee if you have any issues don't forget we're on discord and help you walk you through some of this stuff if you get stuck don't close the window just yet make sure you give us a like dislike comment subscribe hit the bell icon do what you got to do and i do appreciate all the patreon subscribers it definitely helps bring new products and projects and different all the madness that we do on this channel all the time i definitely appreciate it and that's it and y'all take care [Music] we rise up from

Channel: digiblurDIY

Views: 92,421

Rating: 4.9441118 out of 5

Keywords: zigbee home assistant, zha home assistant, zha homeassistant, zigbee homeassistant, zigbee tasmota, zigbee bridge, zha bridge, zha wifi, zigbee wifi, tasmota zha, aqara home assistant, xioami home assistant, motion zigbee, vibration zigbee, door zigbee, how to zigbee, best zigbee, beginner zigbee, pair zigbee, zigbee hassio, zigbee coordinator, range zigbee, zigbee router, zigbee repeater, tasmota zigbee bridge, sonoff bridge tasmota, home assistant zha

Id: dC1AEyFhmnc

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mversion]

Your video just made me spend over $100 you magnificent bastard. Let's see how long it takes this time for my stuff to arrive from AliExpress. My last project which made me order some NodeMCUs and a strip of WS2812B took over 45 days to get here at which time I lost all motivation for the project!

This time I made sure I ordered everything from the official SonOff store, but it looks like they will be shipping out the bridge at a later date. God knows when I'll get the USB TTL though.

Thanks for the informative video. As always you make it look so accessible!

[u/Creatishh]

Looking forward to eBay's dudes doing this and selling it

I don't have the tools or the knowledge to follow this but at little extra then retail to be done this I'd a nice little package

[u/bednim]

Hey /u/digiblur do you know if this bridge can be used simultaneously with xiaomi gateway independently and also chuck in zigbee router too?

[u/GeoffreyMcSwaggins]

I set this up but have great trouble with it, It seems okay on a fresh hass install I tested but that's not convenient obviously