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In the last few weeks, I've been wanting to make my home smarter, in an efficient and secure way.

I wanted to add smart devices that won't have access to my local network or to the internet, so I won't have to worry about separating my network and messing things up security-wise.

That's where I stubmled upon Zigbee and got into this rabbit hole.

What is Zigbee?

From Wikipedia:

Zigbee is a ... specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols used to create personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, ... designed for small scale projects which need wireless connection. Hence, Zigbee is a low-power, low-data-rate, and close proximity (i.e., personal area) wireless ad hoc network.

What that means for me is that my Zigbee-powered smart devices can be on a network of their own, with no access to the internet (since they don't receive IP addresses).

What do I need?

For this to work, I need:

• Zigbee-powered smart device (obviously)
• Zigbee coordinator
• Some computer/SoC to run my software on

For the smart device, I started with a smart plug. For the coordinator, I bought a Sonoff ZBDongle-E which is a USB dongle with an antenna. For the computer, I have a small NUC that's running some of my services that need to run locally. A Raspberry Pi sort of device will also do the trick.

As for the software, I chose to run Zigbee2MQTT which is a bridge that uses my USB dongle to connect to my Zigbee devices. Then, it can be added to Home Assistant/Homebridge/etc.

Getting to It

First of all, my specific USB dongle needed to be flashed with a newer firmware version to support the Ember protocol which is the non-deprecated one. To do that, I used Silabs Firmware Flasher which can easily flash that firmware over the browser. The other alternative is to disassemble the dongle and do something a bit more tricky, which I haven't tried because the first way worked for me.

After doing that, I deployed a simple Docker Compose stack with both Zigbee2MQTT and an MQTT broker (I'm using Eclipse Mosquitto:

services:
  mqtt:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto:2.0
    container_name: mqtt
    restart: unless-stopped
    command: mosquitto -c /mosquitto-no-auth.conf
    volumes:
      - /home/<...>/volumes/zigbee/mosquitto:/mosquitto
    ports:
      - 1883:1883

  zigbee2mqtt:
    image: koenkk/zigbee2mqtt
    container_name: zigbee2mqtt
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /home/<...>>/volumes/zigbee/zigbee2mqtt:/app/data
      - /run/udev:/run/udev:ro
    ports:
      - 8082:8080
    environment:
      - TZ=...
    devices:
      - /dev/serial/by-id/<...>:/dev/ttyUSB0

Note that you'll need to find your USB dongle's ID in /dev/serial/by-id/...

After doing that, navigate to Z2M's (short for Zigbee2MQTT) web UI and make sure everything works. You can then use it to scan for devices.

Integrating with Apple Home

In my case, I preferred to use Apple HomeKit instead of Home Assistant, so I deployed Homebridge which is a very useful service that exposes many types of smart devices to Apple Home:

homebridge:
image: homebridge/homebridge:latest
container_name: homebridge
restart: unless-stopped
network_mode: host
volumes:
  - /home/<...>/volumes/homebridge:/homebridge

I also used the homebridge-z2m plugin inside Homebridge to integrate Zigbee2MQTT with Homebridge.