Setting up Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi to Control Zigbee IoT Devices

In this article, we will introduce how to set up Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and configure Zigbee2MQTT to connect and control the Zigbee based IoT devices. The entire process takes around 1 hour to finish.

---

This is fairly simple and straight forward, thanks to the nice support provided by the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Hardware Platform

An pretty old Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is used.

Some people reported that the Zigbee dongle does not work well with USB3.0 ports due to interference, so maybe using 3 B+ with all USB 2.0 ports is a good option?

Setting up Pi

Follow this tutorial on flashing the firmware

Raspberry PiHome Assistant

After opening homeassistant.local:8123, it takes some time to set everything up

Setting up Home Assistant

Follow the prompt on the webpage to set up admin account, home location, and data sharing settings.

Setting up MQTT Integration

In Settings -> integrations, add MQTT integration

Select MQTT

We will use the provided mosquitto broker to connect the MQTT to Home Assistant service.

It takes a while to install the integration service. After installation, it will automatically start the service.

Setting up Zigbee2MQTT

Install the addon following this tutorial

GitHub - zigbee2mqtt/hassio-zigbee2mqtt: Official Zigbee2MQTT Home Assistant add-onGitHub

Click Add

After adding, refresh the page, and it should appear in the Add-on Store list under section "Home Assistant Add-on: Zigbee2MQTT"

Click into the panel, and click Install.

After installation, start the service.

In this case, it fails to find the Zigbee dongle.

Then we need to manually tell it.

The dongle path can be seen at Settings -> System -> Hardware -> All Hardware

Put this information in the configuration, save and restart the addon.

port: /dev/serial/by-id/usb-ITead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_aec3a1c88f19ec1197ff37cc47486eb0-if00-port0
adapter: zstack

Now it should be started correctly

Adding Zigbee Devices

In the Addon panel, click the "Open WebUI" button.

Click the "Permit Join (All)" to allow pairing with devices.

Now enable pairing mode on the IoT devices, it should then be paired to the service fairly quickly.

I observed that the pairing time is much faster than when using ZHA.

Configuring Apple HomeKit

HomeKit BridgeHome Assistant