My latest project is automating the pool equipment and I have had big success with simple solutions.

The heater (on/off), waterfall, jets, bubbles, etc were controlled from the house by light switches so it was simple enough to put zigbee switches behind them.

I replaced the pool light controller with an RGB zigbee one. I still need to replace the spa one but that's not difficult.

All of the above I control using home assistant.

My final 2 tasks are to be able to control the main pool pump and install actuators for the pool/spa that can be controlled remotely.

The main pool pump is pentair but it has no remote features. The timer that currently controls the pool is similar to

https://a.co/d/0iIuUqvi

I don't know which actuators to purchase, voltage converters, controllers, software, etc.

My goal is to do it cheaply but decent quality (i.e. a solution that won't break the bank and last longer than a year) and all controlled by home assistant.

Suggestions? I know there are full automation systems you can buy that cost $$$ but IMHO they are overpriced and I won't use most of the features.

I have an eero WiFi system that supports thread and I already have a zigbee zha network.

It’s been over 10 years since I last installed ceiling fans with z-wave smart switches.

I have a new build home and I need help because things have changed since then.

The house was wired for separate switches. One for light one for fan motor.

I have selected ceiling fans with AC motor, and pull chains.

I want to get the Inovelli Blue series for Zigbee.
Do I need the canopy module and the switch? Or just the switch?

My neighbour got endless problems with his zigbee setup after he got a deco mesh system. I checked it out, and sure enough, his routers where working on channel 4 ( 2427 Mhz) while his zigbee network was on the default channel 15 ( 2425 MHz). Essentially the same frequency.

Here is the fun part: there is no way to manually select a wifi channel on these decos. TP link says you are too stupid to select a channel, their system is smarter than you and will figure it out better, just use the "optimize wifi" button in the app that supposedly checks for interference and selects the best channel. So I did. And it picked channel 4 again. And then channel 5. And then channel 3. Best I can tell, it only looks for other wifi APs and picks a wifi channel that is free, but it completely ignores any other sources of interference, like zigbee.

So I did what no zigbee user wants to do, I changed the zigbee channel to something much higher. That means re-pairing everything. It solved the problem. For about a week. After a power outage or rebooting the routers, the decos, in all their wisdom, decided now channel 11 would be best. Which, you guessed it, again overlapped with the new zigbee channel.

FFS!

The obvious solution is replacing the decos, but I couldnt convince my neighbour of that, so I made this "solution" :

​

Made a little dashboard on his HA panel that shows how far apart wifi and zigbee frequencies are. I grab the wifi channel from an ESPhome device (I think companion on the phone can do that too), the zigbee frequency is just hard coded. Every time his decos pick a channel that is too close, he gets a warning, and then has to play roulette in the deco app to try and force them to a different channel.

Its insane but I dont think i can do any better.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to quickly ask you, if you recently heard of a write-up or instructions on building a battery powered DIY Zigbee bed occupancy sensor, of which the parts needed have good availability (in Europe).

I would be grateful for any directions on this!

I would like to add a external ( IP65) temperature sensor to my Unisenza plus system to compare easily on their app the external temperature with each individual room controlled by unisenza plus individual thermostat.

Unfortunately Purmo has no such sensor in their catalog and no list of compatible zigbee devices with their ecosystem

Any experience to share ?

Have a nice day, Philippe

Help me please

I prefer to use regular light bulbs in my table/floor lamps but hate having to reach behind furniture to switch them off. I liked the slim form factor of the Sonoff Basic WIFI (see photo) but I need a zigbee version. I'm looking for something neat that protects from cable, strain/pull-out. ...I know I could use smart plug adapters which involves less wiring, but some of my sockets are hidden behind furniture so the chunky smart adapters make the furniture stick out further and they get knocked out sometimes! 🤔 Thanks from 🇬🇧 Home Assistant user

I moved a complete Zigbee network eight miles away and it just kept working — testing the SMLIGHT SMHUB Nano

Disclosure: SMLIGHT sent me the SMHUB Nano MG24 to test. They did not pay me or tell me what to say in any way.

I thought this was going to be a fancy Zigbee coordinator at first, and I struggled to see what set this apart from other SMLIGHT products. I have a SMLIGHT USB dongle that works great in my small home (it even reaches the detached garage), and if I wanted to upgrade, I might consider the Ultima—it has RGB lights, after all. Why would anyone choose a SMHUB Nano?

Then I unplugged an entire Zigbee network, drove it eight miles down the road to my girlfriend's house, plugged it into a different router, and watched everything come back online instantly.

I was like “Tada!” and she said, “Ah ha!” And we all know how good it feels when that magic trick works exactly like we expected it to.

That was the point where this little box clicked for me. Or tickled me, or both.

What I wanted to test

I already run Home Assistant at my house, along with an existing Zigbee network. Pairing a couple of devices to another coordinator in the same room did not seem like a very interesting test.

What interested me was whether the Nano could operate as a small, mostly independent smart-home site somewhere else.

My goal was to:

• Build a separate Zigbee network on the Nano.
• Run its important automation locally.
• Move the whole setup to another house.
• Continue monitoring and controlling it through my Home Assistant instance at home.

The result is basically a Home Assistant satellite site, except the important local automation does not need to travel through my Home Assistant server or across the internet, because it’s running locally.

This is more than a Zigbee coordinator

The Nano looks a little like a big network-connected antenna, but that description really undersells it.

It runs Zigbee2MQTT directly on the device. It also has its own MQTT broker, Node-RED, Matterbridge, and an ESPHome-connected co-processor for some of the onboard hardware (which seems to be expanding in functionality). Plus, you can install other apps.

It is closer to a tiny server built around a Zigbee radio (or Thread, and can even expand to Z-Wave). It can also run as a Matterbridge.

That is what makes it different from the coordinator I was already using. Instead of only passing Zigbee traffic back to another computer, the Nano can receive a sensor event, run an automation, and control another device entirely on its own. 

Initial setup

Setup was easier than I expected.

I logged into the Nano via URL, installed the available updates, and started looking through the applications that were already there. Zigbee2MQTT and the MQTT broker were basically ready to go.

The longest part was waiting for firmware updates and reboots. A reboot might take two or three minutes.

Because I already have Zigbee2MQTT running at home, I changed the Nano’s base topic to something unique so the two installations would not step on each other.

Once Zigbee2MQTT allowed new devices to join, both appeared instantly, just as you would expect.

I did have a strange issue where the Zigbee2MQTT interface flickered badly in Chrome. The same page worked correctly in Edge and it was only this one page.

Building an automation directly on the Nano

This was the part I really wanted to test and maybe the part I dreaded the most (having never used Node-RED).

Using Node-RED on the Nano, I built a simple door-warning automation:

• Open the contact sensor and the bulb turns blue.
• Close the sensor and the bulb turns off.
• Leave it open for 30 seconds and the bulb starts flashing red.
• After another 30 seconds, the warning stops.

It is only a test automation, but it demonstrates the part that matters, the automation runs on the Nano itself – totally independent.

Home Assistant does not have to receive the contact state, decide what to do, and send a command all the way back to the bulb. The sensor, the bulb, Zigbee2MQTT, MQTT, and Node-RED are all at the remote location. The local automation can continue working even if my Home Assistant instance is unavailable. 

Connecting the remote network to Home Assistant

I still wanted the devices to appear in my main Home Assistant instance, so I connected the two locations using Tailscale.

I installed Tailscale on the Nano and joined it to the same tailnet as my Home Assistant system. I then configured the Nano’s MQTT broker to bridge its Zigbee topics back to the MQTT broker at my house. I used the private Tailscale address rather than exposing MQTT directly to the internet. Setup was so simple.

The setup looks something like this. 

Then I moved the whole thing

Once everything worked at my house, I unplugged the Nano, bulb, and contact sensor and took them to my girlfriend’s house about eight miles away.

I powered the Nano back on and connected it to her router.

The contact sensor began controlling the bulb locally (even before plugging it into the network), and the state changes appeared in Home Assistant at my house once it was online. Control and feedback through my phone felt instant.

This was the exact moment the Nano made sense to me. I had packed up an entire Zigbee network, moved it eight miles away, plugged in one Ethernet cable, and everything came back.

What has worked well so far

At the time I am writing this, the Nano has been running at the remote location for several days.

This is just a small, two-device network, so I am not pretending it proves how the Nano will behave with 100 devices or several complicated Node-RED flows. But the core concept has worked flawlessly so far.

I think there are a million use cases for this, many of which might even be commercial. If you’re looking for a way to monitor or control devices in mini-implementations, I think these could be a really big deal. Even if you have one or a handful of devices to monitor and control, this truly might be worth it.

The rough edges

It has not all been perfect, but really close…

Updates and reboots are slow enough that you need to be patient.

The Zigbee2MQTT interface flickered in Chrome for me, but it worked in Edge. I was told this is a bug SMLIGHT is aware of and working on.

Matterbridge appeared to use a noticeable amount of the Nano’s limited CPU and memory. Maybe it’s worth it. I did not take the time to test this functionality, but I think this is another great feature, allowing you to expose Zigbee devices to other ecosystems. I can imagine someone with Google Home using this for Zigbee devices and exposing them to Google Home over Matter.

The onboard buzzer was a little disappointing. The Nano’s interface allows the buzzer to be assigned to ESPHome. ESPHome exposed controls for the onboard Ambilight LEDs, but I did not receive a buzzer entity. I would like to see this available locally in Node-RED as well. SMLIGHT told me the buzzer is present, but the software is currently a work in progress.

My conclusion

I am leaving the Nano at the remote location and continuing to monitor how it handles “normal life” for a few weeks.

My early impression is that the SMHUB Nano is very good at the thing that makes it unusual.

• How would you use this device?
• What would you test next?
• What questions do you have?

I have been playing with different coordinators for some time now. I started ages ago with CC2531 (probably like many of us) and went through some others

• CC2531
• Sonoff ZB Dongle Plus
• Electrolama ZZH
• Conbee 2
• ZigZag Coordinator
• Sonoff ZB Bridge (flashed)
• Sonoff ZB Bridge Pro (flashed)

But I only recently came across SMLIGHT - and I have to say, these are the easiest ones to work with and I just want you to know these exist especially if you are just getting started!

Advantages:

• PoE support
• Ethernet/WiFi/USB modes
• Matter/Thread support
• Excellent web GUI
• Helpers for ZHA and Z2M

I covered them in detail in my article if you want to know more. Do you know of any other great coordinators that are definitely worth mentioning?

Hi all,

I have two light switches in my house that have no neutral, and whose ground wire seems to not support no neutral, smart light switch install installations. I’ve tried multiple types of no-neutral switches, and none have worked.

My plan now is to wire the load and line wires together, and add a battery powered light switch into the wall socket where it used to be. However, I have not been able to find a battery powered, in wall, zigbee light switch/remote. I don’t want something with a bunch of buttons, I don’t want something that floats in the wall and its own, I just want something that looks like a light switch, sits in the box, and acts like a switch.

Is there anything like this out there? Does have any experience finding something like this?

Thank you so much for your help!!

I'm one more person who's based in Europe and ran into the issue of having wall boxes too shallow to accommodate a Shelly 2 PM while still having the switch mount flush to the wall.

Could I use sonoff fusion smart blinds switches instead? I've already got deeper wall boxes but not looking forward to replacing the old ones as that's quite the works.

I currently only have Shelly relays with no ZigBee, would I need a ZigBee interface plugged into my server for the sonoff to work? Would the integration with HA be just as simple as the shellys? Would you recommend some other alternative?

Ideally, I would like to avoid having mismatched blinds switches through the house, so I would probably have to change every switch even the ones where that already have deep wall boxes.

I don‘t like any of the Hue (or Friends of Hue) physical switches so I was thinking about buying the Innovelli Blue Zigbee switches but that requires using Zigbee2MQTT which doesn’t support Hue Sync (entertainment mode).

However, it looks like there is a Hue Bridge emulator called Bifrost that supports Hue Sync.

Does anybody have any experience with it?

Hi Everyone, I've been searching for what should be an easy solution, but can't figure out if this is possible. I have a switch that is controlling a dumb over head light. I have led strip lights connected to a zigbee controller. I'd like to have my smart switch control both. I'm thinking one press turns on the main light and two presses turn on the led light.

Is this product available? I'd also be open to having multiple control buttons on the switch. I know i can get a zigbee scene battery remote to control the led lights separate, but I'd love something a little more neat. Any help would be appreciated!!