The big ZigBee topic

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Most of us started using pimatic with homeduino and the 433mhz devices. But there are much better alternatives. One is ZigBee. Unfortunately while all the zigbee devices uses zigbee, they are all a little bit different. This topic is meant for all the supported zigbee devices in pimatic.

Plugins

There are 4 plugins working with zigbee right now, they all need their own bridge for each brand (exception for the raspbee/deconz, which should work with all zigbee devices).

RaspBee Gateway (TIP)

This device is supported by the pimatic-raspbee plugin. This is one of the best options right now for pimatic since it supports all the devices of tradfri, Hue and Aqara. One sidenote to the hue plugin, this one also supports scenes, which are not (yet) supported by the raspbee plugin.

Great:

• Supports all zigbee devices
• Quite cheap
• Direct connection
• Uses same API as hue so you can use the HUE apps also

Downsides:

• Plugin still in beta, a lot if fixes are still coming in.

Philips Hue

This device is supported by the pimatic-hue-zll plugin, all lights are supported. You can also connect Ikea Tradfri lights to this bridge. The downside is that the lights need to be polled from the gateway, also sensors are not supported/not usable because of this. For lights this plugin is great.

Great:

• Great hardware

Downsides:

• Expensive
• slow sensor readout

Ikea Tradfri

This device is supported by the pimatic-tradfri plugin. This device does not poll the lights but it uses a direct connection, so when you turn on a light, pimatic knows it instant.

Great:

• Cheaper
• Direct connection
• Meshes with aqara/xiaomi sensors

Downsides:

• No sensor read out

Aqara/Xiaomi/Lumi

This device is supported by the pimatic-aqara plugin. This device also uses a direct connection to pimatic. There are great sensor for this gateway, but no lights for now that use zigbee. If you use tradfri lights, then they interact in the same mesh network.

Great:

• Cheap
• Direct connection
• Lot of sensors/actuators
• Meshes with Tradfri

Downsides:

• No bulbs
• all the data is send to Chinese servers. You should block it.

Devices

Lights

All these lights work with pimatic-raspbee

Sensors/actuators

Most of these devices work as great as in their native plugin, except for the magic cube which is kinda weird right now

This are not all the devices yet, If you know more please send them

The Aqara/Xiaomi stuff is very interesting. Do I need a hub or can I connect them with the Ikea Tradfri Hub?

@v1per you need the aqara gateway.

@sweebee Thanks for taking the initiative on this ZigBee topic. I think it is a great idea to help users to understand about what they can get with the different products/brands and to better understand the odds and ends of the underlying technology.

@sweebee
Thanks for the explanation, BodySensor is a motion detector or recognizes its people when they are e.g. sitting.

@v1per its just a motion sensor (PIR)

Nice topic
Still waiting for the ultimate wireless non-433 Mhz device : wireless, same size as KaKu, 2-wire and dimm function. Unfortunately they don’t seem to exist

@koffienl yea me too. I want do ditch all 433mhz devices. But for some I can’t. Like the kitchen light which uses nice large bulbs that I don’t want to replace with hue or tradfri. So still using a build in kaku dimmer.

@sweebee said in The big ZigBee topic:

@koffienl yea me too. I want do ditch all 433mhz devices. But for some I can’t. Like the kitchen light which uses nice large bulbs that I don’t want to replace with hue or tradfri. So still using a build in kaku dimmer.

Yup, same here. In the living room are 2 ceiling lamps with each 4 GU10 bulbs. Replacing these for something with zigbee like would result in buying 8(!) bulbs. Expensive because the wireless hardware is mostly put in the bulb instead of something like KaKu.
In total I have about 25 to 30 GU LED bulbs, driven with just 3 KaKu devices. A lot cheaper than separate wireless bulbs

Doesn’t the Fibaro actors work with zigbee? Some friends are using in this a z-wave dongle.

@ortin said in The big ZigBee topic:

Doesn’t the Fibaro actors work with zigbee? Some friends are using in this a z-wave dongle.

As far as I rememeber: fibaro uses 3-wire system and te fibaro hardware is quite expensive

Downsides of Aquara

• It is not possible to disable the cloud data service. The device frequently sends data to the cloud and is calling at home. Functionality of the device appears to be degraded when the internet connectivity is blocked according to user reports.

I think this is important to mention as it constitutes a security risk and data privacy issue

@mwittig said in The big ZigBee topic:

Downsides of Aquara

• It is not possible to disable the cloud data service. The device frequently sends data to the cloud and is calling at home. Functionality of the device appears to be degraded when the internet connectivity is blocked according to user reports.

I think this is important to mention as it constitutes a security risk and data privacy issue

Are you sure?
Never heard about sensors not working properly after blocking internet access for the gateay in the router.
When you use 3rd party software/scripts to talk and listen to the gateway you can completely uninstall the MiHome app from your phone.

mwittig is right. The temp sensors makes some trouble when you block GW internet access. The temp went 100°C for a while or the humidity and pressure goes to 0%. The problem occurs 4-5 times per day
Since yesterday I moved to sweebees Aqara plugin. He filters the incorrect value. With the plugin it seems to be okay to block the access.

Added the Chinese connection to the downsides. And yes my plugin checks for valid sensor outputs like the temp and humidity.

Hi,
a tip for your zigbee topic.
My pimatic work with the raspbee-bridge-system of Dresden-Elektronik over the hue- plugin.

Dresden Elektronik Raspbee

Here is a overview of my devices in the “deCONZ” webinterface.

and here in pimatic.

The hue- plugin make the remoutecontrol and dimmer to light groups.

I have this hardware
from Amazon: raspbee 35 €
from Ikea: Remoute Control set with Bulb 25 € / Dimmer 10 €
from Amazon: innrA 15 €
from Philips: no friends of Hue (works only without remoute) 75- 85 €

MfG.

What about these dirt cheap ZigBee dongles offered for 10 Euros on ALI?

These dongles are mainly based on the TI CC2531 module and it would be nice to have a working solution for that. It seem some guys in the Openhab community made some progress here. There is a Java driver which appears to rule them all - https://github.com/zsmartsystems/com.zsmartsystems.zigbee. Well, apparently that’s just the client part which implements the serial driver communication. The tricky bit perhaps is to flash these dongles with the right firmware which is said to be available on the TI web site. Does anybody have experience with this?

http://www.ti.com/tool/cc2531emk

This may also be interesting:

• https://github.com/zigbeer/zigbee-shepherd
• https://github.com/ninjablocks/node-zigbee

@developer Nobody?

Added some more devices and added info about the pimatic-raspbee plugin.

@mwittig I think raspbee is the way to go now.

hello is it posible to instal the raspbee on the same pi as where pimatic is install because piratic is not starting because the web server from the cons is already running it is getting a conflict