What could we do with this for $10?

Any ideas?

Do you have any problematic Zigbee devices that have issues connecting with or operating under HE? If so then you could set up an instance of HomeAssistant (HA) + that dongle and then pair the devices to HA and connect them to HE via the community HomeAssistant Bridge app & driver.

Of course you could set up HA anyway for fun and learning... might give you an appreciation for the overall simplicity of HE - :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

To be fair HA is great initially but the further you go the more complicated it can get. Definitely a large rabbit hole and time suck. Lots of cool stuff though.

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I tried to start with HA 6 or 7 years ago. It was too much for me at that time and I took the easy way out with SmartThings. I was very happy with SmartThings at first. Everything worked. And then ... you know the story.

Hubitat was, and sometimes is, very frustrating but today everything is working. In truth, when my Hubitat appears to be working flakily I can usually trace the problem to a Zigbee sensor with a low battery or some disruption of the Z-Wave network like turning off a breaker for 15 hours for another project.

Firing up a Pi with HA and this device and my USB Z-Wave stick is tempting!

Maybe after I clean out the garage.

:slightly_smiling_face:

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I have an instance running for testing - it is definitely worth experimenting with I think. At this point I would never consider HA for my residential clients. It's too involved but for home tinkering works great.

On a side note - if you haven't already automate your soon to be clean garage with a relay! :rofl:

(it never ends)

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I was just finishing up a very clever response when the text box dumped it all. :grimacing:

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3 strike and I am out with Home Assistant, I love the dongle for diagnostics but most of the data I get now comes right from the hubitat. In the early days of Zwave having decent external diagnostic was essential with big installs.

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FYI, you can also integrate zigbee2mqtt with Hubitat using node-red. That dongle will make a terrific zigbee 3.0 coordinator with z2m.

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Yep - no brainer at that price. I use a Conbee for zigbee2mqtt which works great, but it's 5x the price of this.

Alternatively you should be able to flash it with router firmware and this would most likely perform as a repeater better than the ikea etc outlets available.

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Welp, already back ordered.

Received mine on Thursday. I have a linux server running docker containers including Node-Red which I already use for all my HE rules, so I decided to setup a zigbee2mqtt and a Mosquito MQTT docker container to test this device. I also installed the node-red-contrib-zigbee2mqtt node to use in my Node-Red instance. First time I have tried anything like this, but it was really easy to get it all setup and going.

I did not update the firmware on the Sonoff, I just plugged it in and then set all the necessary configurations. So far I have added a mixture of plugs to use as repeaters, motion and contact sensors plus some repeater and non repeater bulbs.

One observation, when pairing some devices, especially mains powered devices, I found they need to be as close to the hub as possible or they have problems pairing. I started off pairing them about 12-15 feet from the hub and some would be found, but the process never completed the device type discovery properly. I then remembered having problems with Iris V1 devices that had to be paired right next to my HE, so I started pairing the devices about 3-5 feet from the hub and since then I have had no issues. Pairing has been very fast. Other than that, I have not observed any other oddity/problem.

For $10 (actually I had a discount code so got it for $8.49) it is worth buying and playing with.

Edit: forgot to mention. In testing I have seen no difference in speed between the same type of devices on this hub compared to my HE.

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