Zigbee 2022 TIPS with Home Assistant

think about me one more time before you go someday oh no [Music] i've been feeling this way for far too long [Music] [Music] so it's been about a good year that i've been using zigbee in my production smart home and pretty much relying on the usage of them day in and day out and no this isn't going to be a video about how much crap i can put on the table when we go over all the little things if you do want to see we go through a lot of different hardware and issues and whatever it may be on different ones and which ones i hate and which ones i do like definitely let me know shoot a comment down below maybe we'll go through a bunch of different zigbee stuff that i have you know because i have some on hand and more than this it's addicting but in the time being i'll leave some of my favorites down in the video description down below and those are affiliate links and the way those do work there's no additional calls to you but it does help out the channel i do appreciate it so if you're new to well what is zigbee stuff i've done a bunch of different little roll up videos on zigbee and kind of what it is but a real quick basis of what it is it's a wireless protocol that goes in your house it routes and does all the magical things you just plug it in most of the time you just take out one of the products such as a smart bulb or even door sensors water leak sensors you know for you never know if that toilet starts leaking and you're not around to go fix the issue it could save you a bunch of money there's tons of different things like that from motion sensors and there's no soldering there's no flashing i know we like to do a lot other than the channel and sometimes this is boring but then sometimes it's just refreshing to be able to open the box push the little button on the back and boom it's on your smart home network and you can just do all the things with it and start monitoring whatever it may be now if you're using some of the little manufacturer hubs or different ones say the even smart things or these little different len kind ones or even down to an amazon echo the video may not exactly be for you but hey maybe i said opportunity for you to even go bigger and do more with the different devices in your home so we're gonna be doing most of this with home assistant and zigbee to mqtt and no it's not very confusing i know there's tons of terms and whatnot but the little master radios the one i like is the cc 2652 so if you ever see those numbers make sure it is a 2652 or better i'm assuming they may probably have some better chipsets come out down the road and it's not that confusing or anything most of the time you just plug these into your hub like say home assistant and whether it be your computer or whatever it might be you're running home assistant on or zigbee to mqtt because not everybody runs home assistant trust me i understand that and it's just configuring it plug it in and rock and roll probably upgrade the firmware i did a video on that as well and that's pretty much it it's sometimes like i said boring you just take the stuff out and pair it up and you're done so one thing i wanted to make sure and cover in this was that some of the setup that i see and the issues out in the various forms and discord and whatnot because i'd like to get you set up where you get a solid zigbee network without having to change things later say i didn't say it correctly on my previous video exactly right and hey yeah go ahead and blame it on me i'll take the blame so here we'll correct things get you going because some of these settings if you do change them you have to pair everything back up and yeah that sucks walking around to painting ass with your phone trying to pair all the things up and unscrewing light bulbs and pushing buttons and digging behind toy if you've got a bunch of devices yeah it sucks so we're going to get things set up correctly from the get go what controls all this how does this all work and how does this all tie in i know most of you are out there running home assistant maybe some open hab people or just some node-red people or say you're new to the thing you may want to go check out what home assistant's all about it's really awesome home automation software suite does all the cool things zigbee to mqtt is just like a small add-on of that that handles the communication and all the administration of your zigbee devices so you can do your pairing you can delete stuff rename stuff you can do all the little things you can even interact with them in there now there is zigbee built into home assistant itself it's called zha some of you may prefer that because there's less installation but there are some issues with some devices that i've found such as even re as of recent the little len kind motion sensor the newer firmware actually just doesn't work on zha it works fine in zigbee to mqtt having seen people say it doesn't work right and some other zigbee things but hey i don't know how zigbeetlqt does the magic no one's done any type of fix to make it work right it just works so that's one of the things along with some other different sensors that i have had different some of the tp-link ones those didn't wouldn't even pair at all with zha but they worked fine after people added them to zigbee to mqtt so that just prefer to use this one that's the one we're going to cover another good thing is it's decoupled from home assistant so if there's an update or something needs to be done in zigbee they don't have to wait for the new update of zha to be proled into that monthly update of home assistance so they can just roll out a new update every day which is pretty much what they do it's insane that they have some of the development updates just pretty much daily on as things get added to zigbee team qtt so you may be asking well what is supported right by there should i go to some other crazy weird website that has nothing to do with zigbee to mqtt absolutely not go to the source here zigbeetmqtt it's curated by all the different developers and the people that have done the adding the additional devices to zigbeetmqtt so you can know it does work so go dig around it's got a bunch of cool pictures you can search by vendor you can see what it exposes so you want to find all the different ones from different valves or whatever it is or you just want to straight up search search for temp you can go in here and say hey look there's me a temperature sensor and boom you can go see and then you can go google where to buy that particular temperature sensor if it's available you know through your channels of where you can buy things in your country pretty cool stuff and then another thing they have all the installation guides on here if you don't want to watch my crazy long ass videos you can skip them all go straight to the guides right here go through all the little installations whether you're using docker docker compose or even just using home assistant want to do the add-on thing without having to be all the geeky stuff it's really easy to do the add-on but there are a couple different limitations and i do like to cover that on the installation of zigbee team qtt in the supervisor now the big key here i see a lot of people skipping the configuration because they think it's just hey hit the add on mash the button and hit the road right and then start pairing stuff up yeah possibly now so i do get it but jump into the configuration there's some things we need to change here of course you would need to change the port based on which device you have i covered that in one of my previous ones there's can't cover them all here that they have all the different ones from different ports and then the ethernet ones hey if you get stuck jump down in the discord link down below will definitely help you get the correct port you see the default is 11 don't leave it default unless you really want eleven but go jump in say you wanted 15. just change it take seconds saves you a lot of time next thing is you see this network key you'll notice a little pattern right here i know math is hard it is hard for me one three five seven nine eleven that's not a great key that's your security network key that should be unique and should be yours so that's one of the limitations though with the supervisor add-on thing is in regular zigbee mqtt installations with docker and whatnot you could just change the all this to generate and it would make a random one well you got to do the random thing yourself change some of the numbers around change this pan id number around a little bit and make it yours make it unique and that way you don't have to worry about anything or somebody sniffing your network or potentially jumping on your network with other devices because you're using a default key especially be bad to say if you're an apartment or whatnot or a cl dense area and there's some other zigbee qtt users that left theirs default as well now if you do change this stuff later quite all right but there is a feature in zigbee to mqtt that requires you to go delete the backup file on your device first otherwise it's a two-step procedure because it doesn't want you to accidentally break your network just read the log it'll tell you what file to go delete and you can delete that file and you restart it and it should be good to go so zigbee channel this is an important one very important i see this get confused a lot and the problem is is the numbering doesn't really make sense so in wi-fi if you look at this current graphic here and we get this from just to give credit the ubiquity ui community if you google wi-fi zigbee channels you'll find this graphic so if you look there's typically three non-overlapping channels and that's in a 20 megahertz in 2.4 gigahertz and there's a ton of numbers here trust me don't let your eyes glaze over too fast here but in the wi-fi for the 2.4 gigahertz there's one through 11 on the channels in the us i know some countries have more or less so we're just going to talk about what i can turn on in my area here you if you have multiple access points where you have say a wi-fi in the front of your house and the wi-fi in the back you'll want to say set those on shade channel 1 6 or 11. don't have them overlapping and that way you can roam from access point to access point and they don't kind of step on each other well you don't want your wi-fi related to step on your zigbee either because zigbee runs in 2.4 gigahertz as well that's what helps bring the cost down because you have that a whole economy of scale where zigbee devices that are made in one country can be used in another country it's just great that it works that way so pretty much for the most part you just can buy whatever zigbee devices you don't have to worry about what country it came from what i would recommend and you'll see a lot of things recommend or is to use channel 15 20 or 25 because in default it's channel 11. well you can see it's right there in that power alley of wi-fi channel one so you could be stepping on your zigbee network can be causing some issues then there's the whole thing about zl channels zigbee light link i believe is what it's called some devices will only work on those channels so it's just best just go ahead and pick those in between channels you're going to have less interference find a good channel 15 20 or 25 and call it a day now you may be saying well why don't i just use 26 well some devices don't support 26 again and then there's a lot of different things i've read that say in some countries including the us there is a reduced power on channel 26 so i try to stay away from that one as well so pick your channel call it a day 15 20 or 25. so i wanted to address one of the misconceptions i see on a bunch of different guides and different websites and even on different discord forms at times is they're saying to take the sensor and this is the little zigbee water sensor and you're supposed to bring it to your system really close and pair it up and then go bring it and put it in the bathroom by the toilet or whatever right no don't do that that's not gonna be the way you should do things what you should do to have a good zigbee network is you want to build out that mesh first you want to pair your devices in place so what does that exactly mean well take for instance a little plug such as this this is a little z len kind plug most devices that have mains power except for the single edge light bulbs those don't do routing but everything else for the most part usually when it's mains power is going to do routing or they call it repeating what you'll want to do is go ahead if you're building out a bunch at one time is go ahead and place all of your mains power devices first pair them up and kind of build outward from the coordinator itself then that kind of creates your mesh your stepping stones and then you'll want to add and pair in place your particular sensors you maybe say why is that well then you pair it with the coordinator that's way across the house when yet there's this plug is right there in the other side of the bathroom well you want to go ahead and talk to that plug right away and for the most part some things will save on battery power they'll talk at a lower power to that plug it's just going to create a better mesh network so just basically pair your stuff in place stop doing that thing and bring all your stuff next to the computer that's just stupid now another cool feature i highly recommend you turn on because again you have that cc 2652 right and it's up to the job trust me is this availability what does that mean it's going to tell you when devices fall off the network or they just haven't been heard of for so long that defaults i think 25 hours for the battery devices and it'll mark them as offline which you'll also see was unavailable in the home assistant front end but that setting is not turned on by default so if you jump over to settings and you want to turn on availability and make sure it is checked and you do need to hit submit and then you need to restart zigbee to mqtt for it to take effect now if you do change it to advanced you can come in here and change the timeouts if you really want to get advanced i think you can even change the timeouts per device as well if you dig into the configuration a little more now then there's another setting i do like to change is if you look under settings in advanced scroll down past the extended pan id it's all those red squares and change your last scene to iso 8601 local if it's not set to that and it's a little drop down so you don't have to remember exactly what i just said and that's going to drop your current time that way you can see that in home assistant to see the last time it was seen so once you do any little settings in here i'll see if i can go grab the ones for the supervisor because i believe in supervisor you if you change them in here the configuration for the add-on overrides that unfortunately so i'll see if i can grab the little yaml stuff and put it down in the description down below for you or if you we can't put it there you can definitely jump into discord and ask how to do it there if you do like zigbee tmqtt as much as i do smash one of those buttons for those guys they do a lot of hard work and put a lot of blood sweat and tears into this product to make it really work well for your home and because we all rely on this every day last but not least i see another issue in there is do make sure you are on the latest version of zigbee to mqtt if you have been using it for a while in supervisor the address did change there is a thread on how to migrate your stuff to the most recent version it's not too bad to do i'll see if i can put that link down in the description as well now of course if you're on docker docker compose you just pull the new container and call it a day the coordinator revision that's gonna be the firmware as you can see i'm using the 2022 january third one no issues i use it in production and i'll leave the link to that weird guy that did the long video on how to upgrade the thing no i'm just kidding yeah i'll leave that one out there if you're wondering hey do i have to do anything special for my devices once i add them and pair them with zigbee team qtt to get them over to home assistant nope automatically auto discovery through mqtt they'll pop straight into your mqtt integration and they'll have all the things you can go through the names will be there based on the name you gave it in zigbeetmqtt or you could really name them in here as well it's pretty simple to do it's automatic probably even by the time that you jump from the gui from zigbee to over to here it's already sitting there waiting for you to add it to your automations guise whatever it may be now lastly there's a weird thing that the xiaomi or aquarius censors and you know you may be thinking well how i'm not pronouncing it right y'all picked on me on that live stream i like to just call them the aquarium sensors right they're just shortened well they have some issues at times when you're trying to pair them and then even trying to keep them connected even habitat i noticed you were talking about home assistant and zigbeetmqtt but hey it's all zigbee from there on they have a whole thread devoted to just those particular devices and that should tell you something but sometimes they have some decent devices like their little temperature humidity sensor or their little motion sensor but if you can get them paired up has a little pairing dance at times that i have to do or some people have shown me where you push the pairing button every second or two while it's in the middle of doing the configuring and it pairs up just fine but i've also found some other tricks to get those paired up as well because they're sticky and what i mean by sticky is that if you take it and pair up that aquaria device with next to it it pairs up to this plug well then you happen to move this plug over to the other side of the house most devices will automatically over time re-route to the best device except for the aquaria ones they just suck at trying to fix their little mesh thing i don't know why it's just i guess they don't use some standard zigbee stuff like they talk about in this article so what's the best thing to do well with zigbee twim qtt there's a cool little feature and i didn't even know it until tinkerer showed me it if you come up here in zigbeetmqtt in the gui when you're going to go add something into your device list you typically just want to hit permit join and hit all right and you maybe never paid attention to what the all was well hit the little drop down next to it and now you get all of your different mains powered devices like hey this patio floodlight maybe that aquarius sensor is going to be right next to that floodlight and yes that flood light would have power all the time so you could hit zigbee say on my instance patio flood and then now the option says permit join zig patio flood and then now it's going to do the little countdown and then i would go ahead and do that pairing when i'm right next to that floodlight and i would probably want to use my phone tablet or laptop actually when i'm over by that floodlight so just keep that in mind with the aquari devices they can be kind of weird but hey sometimes they have some decent sensors that really no one else has so i do understand getting a hold of those sensors just gotta play around with some of the weirdness they have so hopefully this wraps it up helps a lot of different people and get set up and get running and hit the races with doing zigbee to mqtt and get a really awesome zigbee network and because you one day you'll get to play with a cool little map like this that a lot of people say at different times it just wants to look like a pentagram of some sort but it's pretty awesome that once you do get a bunch of different devices you get to see everything in this little neat map that's that's cool to look at so i appreciate all the patreon subscribers youtube members the whole thing we definitely couldn't do a lot of this without you it definitely helps out the channel and hey if you don't want to do it that way just share our stuff like it shoot us a comment down below whatever it may be or hell give us a thumbs down i don't care and well that's it and y'all know the drill and it's cool and stuff besides morgan excited [Music] [Music] because it's cool and stuff

Channel: digiblurDIY

Views: 52,260

Keywords: digiblur, digiblurDIY, home automation, hass.io, hassos, tasmota, esp32, esp8266, arduino, esphome, diy, smart home, electronics, cameras, zigbee, wifi, zigbee2mqtt, zigbee 2022, how to zigbee, pairing zigbee, echo zigbee, alexa zigbee, mqtt

Id: 1dcAXkJxzcY

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022