I really like the idea of this little cheap device doing local scenes (no cloud). I bought it thinking “hey, zigbee is a standard !” but no, I can only pair with sonoff devices ?
My question : do you have a plan (yes/no) to open your ecosystem to other zigbee brands ? When will we be able to add, for example, tuya switches/sensors to the zigbee bridge pro ?
I also have your USB Zigbee Bridge-P and this one works wonderfully with home assistant and can pair with other brands. Why not the bridge pro ?
Because of the limited MCU resources of ZBBridge Pro, it was designed to support only SONOFF branded or zigbee products labeled “eWeLink support,” and other third-party brands with no guarantee that they could be accessed correctly.
zigbee wireless protocol may be a standard, but the commands/payload on it are not necessarily standard. That’s why you can’t add IKEA and Philips zigbee devices to each other’s gateways.
But if you are willing to analyze all the different commands/payload and support them one by one, then of course you can also control all the zigbee devices of different brands - this is what zigbee2Mqtt is doing, it relies on everyone’s contributions, and constantly increase the independent analysis of each model of different brands of products.
But there is a price to be paid for parsing all the commands for all the models of each brands, and that requires sufficient resources. So you can’t run the home assistant or Zigbee2Mqtt system on an ESP32 chip, you need to do it on a Raspberry PI.
As you know, the ZBBridge Pro is a liite chip device which just using the ESP32, so it can’t do what a Raspberry PI can do to parse and control the different commands of all brands and models, and its small memory is only enough to fill the understanding of SONOFF brand commands.
well, as far as I read about Zigbee2Mqtt, it still needs all your zigbee devices to be connected to a Zigbee Hub (that can connect to them) and then converts that to an Mqtt messagesd in your wifi. Nice. The whole reason why I started buying zigbee devices is because I didn’t want to put them in my wifi. Otherwise, I would buy de wifi version of the same devices, or even f devices that don’t have a zigbee version. I bought a Sonoff Wifi Dual switch for controlling my curtain motor, works nice in Alexa but I cannot control with the node-red connection, it doesn’t come in the devices list
Blockquote well, as far as I read about Zigbee2Mqtt, it still needs all your zigbee devices to be connected to a Zigbee Hub
No, Zigbee2MQTT can connect to a Zigbee hub but it is more standard to connect it directly to a Zigbee Radio using USB, for example the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus’. The brains behind all the computation takes place on the computer to which it is attached, usually a Raspberry Pi.no need for wifi at all in the usual configuration.
Hi @enjoyaol
I am using the sonoff zigbee bridge (not the pro) with other brand devices. Seems like a hit & miss situation however. Regardless, I have had success pairing and using the following:
I would suggest you dig out an updated version of the for your bridge (similar to screenshot attached) on the sonoff web site. You will find other brands (Hue, Aqara etc) are supported. And if you succeed with third-party devices please post to share with everyone.
I gave my brother a Zigbee Bridge pro for Christmas. Before doing so I paired 2 of 4 other brand stuff I tried both of the items that didn’t pair work with iHost, which is a lot more powerful Previously paired a water sensor to a Zigbee Bridge but it thought it was a door.
in that case, the Zigbee Dongle is the Zigbee Hub. But it is just “terminology”
The fact is that then the Zigbee devices are NOT connected to the zigbee bridge PRO anymore (which is at the subject of this thread)
It makes sense, I just ordered a Dongle Plus to start seeing where “that” goes… Still, the sensors themselves are NOT sending the mqtt messages, the Raspberry Pi receives the messages from the Zigbee devices (not mqtt) and sends it into the mqtt subscribers. If you don’t have ethernet in the Raspberry Pi, it would only be local subscribers
No it’s not. The dongle usually only has software flow control, which means the flow control is happening in software, therefore the hub is the pairing of hardware and software.
technically, you are completely right. The “new universal hub” is the combination of the Dongle with whatever software you are using in the Raspberry (Zigbee2MQTT in this case). It helps because now you can connect to that universal HUB all the zigbee devices that it supports (while the sonoff zigbee PRO mentioned in the topic of the thread will only support sonoff devices). Tha point is that your combination of software+hardware is completely replacing the Sonoff Hub… The Sonoff Hub is also a combination of a radio transmiter and a microcontroller running some software… After you replace it with the dongle+raspberry+software, the sonoff hub becomes less than a door stopper.
My question : do you have a plan (yes/no) to open your ecosystem to other zigbee brands ? When will we be able to add, for example, tuya switches/sensors to the zigbee bridge pro ?
I also have your USB Zigbee Bridge-P and this one works wonderfully with home assistant and can pair with other brands. Why not the bridge pro ?
he can already do it with the USB Dongle that, in combination with some processing hardware (pi maybe) works as a universal hub. He is asking when a similar approach will be implemented in the zigbee bridge pro, that only supports sonoff devices. You can extend the question to the NS Panel Pro.
The truth is – not all devices with the Zigbee logo fully comply with Zigbee 3.0 specs.
In zb spec, there’s even no device type called temperature & humidity sensor. So when you pair such a sensor to a standard Zigbee hub, it would only display temperature or humidity.
Lots of devices iHost supports can barely work with other so-called standard ZigBee 3.0 hubs.
