I want to get started with home automation, probably based on a raspberry pi (or as of now with my banana pi which is my home server) and either openHAB or home assistant. My goal is, first, to put some temperature/humidity sensors in varous rooms and leak detector in my basement where I had some issues with the main drain. I wonder if you have some recomendations for a usb dongle for zigbee and/or z-wave compatible with linux, not too expensive but good enough if I want to extend the network later. I read about SONOFF-ZB USB Dongle Plus Zigbee 3.0 available on Chinese websites. What do you think?
For advice specific to Home Assistant, I would ask their community. It’s fairly active.
Just recently got the SONOFF-ZB Plus E dongle and it’s been working well for me. I was able to flash it to use both ZigBee and Thread.
I am running Aotect Zi-Stick (ZGA008), but I would probably go with Sonoff ZBDongle-E, which is based the same EFR32MG21 chip, but has external antenna.
I recommend to use #Zigbee2MQTT because it’s decoupled from home automation software:
- ability to switch software in future without repairing all devices in different software,
- no duplication of efforts to add device support in multiple softwares,
- ability to run (or evaluate) different software in parallel against the same Zigbee network.
