r/homeassistant • u/DigSubstantial8934 • 10h ago
Will they / should they make a Zigbee version of ZWA-2?
Given all the positive reviews and apparent strong sales of the ZWA-2, do you think HA should make a version for Zigbee? I know I’d personally love to have a solid Zigbee device with an excellent antenna! It would be a day 1 purchase for me.
I’m also thinking since they’ve released a Zigbee/Thread stick previously, it would make sense to improve it and use a similar design language to the ZWA-2 for a version 2 device. Ideally not a combo radio though, I’ve never had great luck with the dual radio sticks.
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u/paul345 9h ago
What problem are you trying to solve that isnt already solved by an SLZB-06 zigbee coordinator?
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u/DigSubstantial8934 8h ago
So that’s exactly why I asked this. I’m currently using the Sonoff USB stick. I ordered the SLZB-MR1 around Prime day, and went through the work to move all my devices over… only to find my signal strength actually decreased on all of my devices, some by a lot, and others were no longer communicating directly. After a ton of tinkering, I gave up and returned it. I can’t explain why it was worse, but it was for some reason.
Given how much everyone seems to love the ZWA-2 (mine isn’t delivered yet), having a really high quality Zigbee replacement was on my mind.
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u/skiresq 7h ago
Did you happen to check the channel it was using and compare it to the WiFi networks around to see if there was a clash? I say this because I was having a piss poor zigbee experience and then noticed it as well as me of my networks was on channel 11. I moved zigbee to channel 25 and it’s been flawless since.
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u/DigSubstantial8934 7h ago
It was a 1:1 swap, I made sure everything was exactly the same. I think I’m also using ch 25. I have APs on WiFi channels 1, 6, and 11 in the house.
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u/Rihan-Arfan 7h ago
Silly suggestion but have you made sure you tightened the antenna fully onto the device?
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u/rapax 5h ago
Dumb question, if I may: my ZigBee network is currently on channel 15. If I switch to another channel, will I have to re-pair all the devices?
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u/StainedMemories 2h ago
Most likely not all devices at least. If you’re lucky all devices make the change, but there could be a few stragglers you have to re-pair.
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u/gslone 2h ago
Maybe the network didn‘t configure itself in the same way like before, resulting in worse signal strengths?
Zigbee networks with the mix of devices that most of us are using are terrible at optimizing themselves. I don‘t know how many times i had to re-pair end devices until they finally found a mesh neighbor that gave them proper signal strength. So it might not have been the coordinator that was the issue in your migration - the end devices also play a role in how „intelligent“ they select their uplinks.
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u/ithinkimightknowit 1h ago
I went back to the sonoff usb 3.0 I found I had lots of drop outs not sure if it was some cheap chatty mmwave sensors causing it but I found the sonoff better. I have about 100 devices and nothing drops out. I did try a couple of the smblight sticks but no luck. I ended up putting them in repeater mode.
It's really easy swapping over I did not have any issues. I also did change the channels to quite a few different ones and made sure my 2.4 network was as far away as possible but still no luck.
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u/Ill_Nefariousness242 8h ago
Probably not necessary.
For Zigbee, there are already several excellent products like Smlight, which should be more than enough, and they're already quite expensive for the average income in my country.
Other dongles available in market today also already good enough. I even only use Zigbee dongles made by local vendors and have never had any range issues, as long as you have enough routers.
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u/Auravendill 54m ago
There are strong indications, that they will indeed built something like a ZBT-2 and that it will share some hardware. How similar the design will be, is left to see. The antenna doesn't need to be as large on Zigbee, so maybe they will reuse the same base mould and add a shorter antenna? (I bet it would be used for the typical "you vs the guy she told you not to worry about"-meme immediately)
As you can see in my post from a few days acgo, they worded their FAQ in such a way, that makes it really obvious, that they will use the at least some parts of the ZWA-2 for other second-gen sticks. And the amount of possible standards isn't that long:
- Thread/Matter
- Zigbee
- Lora
- BLE
- 433MHz
and since the have a first gen Thread + Zigbee stick (you get both by buying the same stick twice, since afaik the stick doesn't handle both at once well), that is the most likely next second gen device to be announced.
Also someone found already the git merges for a ZBT-2.
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u/hanumanCT 6h ago
Radios should be over IP, even better when they're POE. It gives you far more flexability where to locate them and if you fail over to another instance, you don't have to go moving plugs around. It just makes way more sense to have them on the network as a network resource. I have an SMLight zigbee that is awesome just for this reason. I did buy and install the ZWA-2 today, and it's great, but my HA box is in my mechanical room in my basement and antenna placement is suboptimal.
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u/SummerWhiteyFisk 6h ago
Just out of curiosity what’s the difference between the new z wave device and a standard z wave hub? I’ve never had any issues with my sonoff dongle so idk what the value add would be unless it also included thread
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u/haddonist 5h ago
Antenna is much longer and matched to the zwave frequency, so will be better at Long Range.
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u/yetAnotherLaura 10h ago
Am I missing something? They released the Skyconnect dongle ages ago. Heck, so long that I think it doesn't use that name anymore?.
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u/DigSubstantial8934 10h ago
I understand, I’m asking if a version two might exist soon that is similar to the ZWA-2 with a large awesome antenna.
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u/darthrater78 6h ago
With Zigbee you can buy a true POE coordinator with the UZG-01.
You can simulate that same kind of hardware freedom for ZWave with a pi or something tiny like a bee link and jsui docker.
I wrote up a guide on how to do both.
https://ramblingnonsense.nscriven.net/p/decouple-zigbee-and-zwave-from-home-assistant
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u/WannaBMonkey 10h ago
I don’t think there is a long distance version of Zigbee. A nice antenna would be better but I’m not sure how much it would really change.
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u/theroundfile 10h ago
No, because why would I want a dongle instead of a PoE device?
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u/curt7000 8h ago
Because when your network goes down, a dongle still works!
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u/Ulrar 2h ago
.. but your HA isn't reachable.
It's also infinitely more likely that your HA box will go down, and it's harder to replace than a network switch.
With a networked coordinator, you can do high availability on HA, have it automatically move to another host without needing to go and move a bunch of usb devices with it
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u/LambdaNuC 10h ago
Probably not. The optimal antenna length for ZigBee (2.4 GHz) is 2.6 times shorter than the optimal antenna length for Zwave (0.908 GHz in North America), so it would not benefit as much from the big antenna compared to the sticks already available on the market.