Many years ago my smart home started with philips hue. As you may know, philips hue works on the zigbee protocol which enables meshing. Which let’s you connect further away devices. Although I really love philips hue and it’s bridge I need to connect more devices.
Ooh the zigbee
As one of my favorite youtubers says, Ooh the zigbee! Although his opinion on philips hue isn’t the one I share, I did ditch the bridge and go with conbeeII and deconz in homeassistant. This USB device lets me connect more device. It even lets me connect more diffferent brands. For now I mostly own philips hue, but I will expand in the comming few weeks
Performance
In my opinion the performance is better than the hue bridg. Better range, more devices and faster responding sensors. offcourse the faster response is because of USB directly to Homeassistant instead of a bridge over ethernet.
Setup
The prerequisites for this setup are:
- Up and running home assistant
- Zigbee bridge (I use ConbeeII)
- Other devices
For the rest of the guide, click here. It’s a complete guide on how to start or how to proceed. Otherwise this post will be too long.
