Connect Zigbee and Thread on One Adapter | Home Assistant Setup

“In today's video, I'm going to make this Zigbee temperature sensor talk to this SLZB-MR3U, which will talk to Home Assistant, which will then come back and talk to the SLZB-MR3U and send a message to this, which is a thread plug to switch on.” “It’s a bit different to other Zigbee coordinators you’ve seen me go through because it’s got two radios.” “I always think this is really nice because it tells you what to type into the YAML files.” “And because we've got two radios, you can do it twice.” “And we're back, and I've got an S4 connected and I can switch it on and off.” “So, we're connected.”.

Transcript

Title: Connect Zigbee and Thread on One Adapter | Home Assistant Setup. Channel: Using the Wrong Words On Porpoise.In today's video, I'm going to make this Zigbee temperature sensor talk to this SLZB-MR3U, which will talk to Home Assistant, which will then come back and talk to the SLZB-MR3U and send a message to this, which is a Thread plug to switch on. So, when it gets cold, the plug will switch on. Or when it gets hot, the plug will switch on. Depends what I've plugged in. So, let's roll the credits and get straight into it.[music]Okay, let's unbox this thing. So, we can pick it up like this, and then put it down like this. And now we can plug it all in.So, as you can see, the network cable is plugged in. I haven't got PoE still; I need to sort that. So, I'm using the USB connector to provide power to it, and let's set it up.Let's flip across to the computer and you can see how I find the thing. So, as normal, I'll go to Advanced IP Scanner and look for the device. And [snorts] it's here somewhere. There we go: 144. So, I'll switch to a browser and connect to that address by putting the IP address in.I'm in the control panel for the device. It's a bit different to other Zigbee coordinators you've seen me go through because it's got two radios. So, I've got radio one (nothing to do with BBC Radio 1) on Zigbee Coordinator, and radio two on Matter over Thread.My connection is Ethernet, as you saw, because I'm connected up. When you go for a Matter connection, it kind of recommends that. IPv6 is off; I'm not sure that's a good or bad idea. I've been up for a few minutes. That's it. That's the dashboard. It's running at 100 meg, and Wi‑Fi's not on.If I quickly run down: here you can specify what mode you want for things. That could run as a Zigbee coordinator and a Zigbee coordinator, or even a Zigbee router and a Zigbee router if you're having trouble with routing. Perhaps that might work. Ethernet-to-Wi‑Fi bridge—no. Connection mode is going to be Ethernet. Yeah, I'm all set up.Zigbee hub will quickly flash onto the dashboard. I'm not using a Zigbee hub. I'm not setting things up here; I'm going to keep my same Zigbee2MQTT.Network-wise, it's [snorts] kind of showing me what's there. It's giving me my IP address. In here are the settings. I always think this is really nice because it tells you what to type into the YAML files. And because we've got two radios, you can do it twice.Security-wise, again, you can set a username and password. I'm not going to do it now, but in a live environment, very good idea. VPN: you can use WireGuard to connect it in. So, if you're trying to run something from a separate building—you're trying to have another router that's in a separate building—you can VPN back from it.It's got dynamic DNS, which means it can go out to the internet and give you a preferred DNS number. Mine's internal. I'm not sure it's a good idea to put the device out on the internet. Don't know.You can do lots of clever things with USB because it's got USB pass-through scripts and automations. We're not going to cover that today.And in settings and tools, you've got the general settings for things: what it's called, what you've got flashed, whether you want a firmware update. I've already done that, but it is a case of going here and doing it. Whether you want your LEDs on or off, or off at night. What your time settings are. I'm in London GMT+1—that's not right, because we're GMT. Okay, this is wrong because we've not gone to British summertime yet, but we'll keep it there for now. Logs and debugs. So that's it; that's the main settings.So, let's switch over to Home Assistant and show you what I'm going to change.So, as normal, there's one area that hasn't recorded the sound properly. As you can see, I'm still wearing a mic, but it decided, “No, I'm not going to do it this time.”So, we need to go into Zigbee2MQTT, but I've already unplugged things, so it didn't start properly. It kind of went horribly wrong when it started up because I'd already unplugged the controller.So, if we go into Settings and Apps and Zigbee2MQTT, what we've got to do is point to the new controller. I'm going to try and keep everything else the same. So, into Configuration: it's a serial device. It's an Ember device and it's running there. So, if I go across here, it's more or less exactly the same. The only difference is going to be the IP address: that 144 instead of whatever I had on my old device.So, if I copy, go back to Home Assistant, and paste that back in again, hopefully when I start it, it'll just work because things are the same. You can copy devices, and I've done videos—I'll do a link at the top of the screen to my Zigbee2MQTT setup.So, if we click Save, then what we need to do is go back to Info and click the Start button and keep our fingers crossed that everything's going to work. Lots of times it has just worked when I've done things like this. Sometimes it hasn't, which is a little annoying.So, let's click Start and see what happens. [snorts] The best way to do things like this is go across to the logs and kind of see what's going on. So, when I look at the logs, it seems to be starting. It's trying to talk to all those devices and seems to be getting responses from them. It's running configuration on things. So, hopefully it'll start everything up.What I probably need to do is flip across to Zigbee2MQTT proper now it's started, so I can kind of see what's there. Yeah, it's got the four devices. Hopefully it's found them all. I normally set things up so if it doesn't talk within 10 minutes, it marks them offline. I have just noted at the top of the screen that it's got zero online. It'll probably find them as time goes on. They're all sat in a box at present [gasps], hiding away.What I'll probably do is delete one of the sensors. Let's pick that temperature sensor. I'm trying to make it warm to see whether it's working or not and blowing into it to warm it up. But I think it might be better to actually delete it and then put it back in again so you can see what's what and where things are going.So, let's give up at that [snorts] and delete the temperature sensor and put it back in again. So, that's just a case of doing Delete, and you need to Force delete otherwise it thinks it's still part of it. Then it's a case of saying Permit join, and at that point you need to get your device and put it in pairing mode.So, with this one, I'm going to get the temperature sensor and push the button. I think you have to push the button for 10 seconds and it'll start flashing. You can just see it there, and then hopefully it'll find it, which it has.There are lots of things I'd normally do here, kind of put the settings, but let's just rename it for now so it's got the right name. And I'm going to update that in Home Assistant as well by clicking the button. So, we'll call it temperature sensor—or not as the case may be. We want to update Home Assistant, and it says press tab, and I think I was pressing tab. Okay, so rename device. So, it's found it. It's got to Zigbee2MQTT. It'll be in Home Assistant.Okay, in Home Assistant, I've got some updates, which we'll update now.[music][sighs and gasps]Okay, let's install a Thread Border Router. You can wander about for ages. You can go to the top and type in “Thread Border Router,” and click Install. I'm not going to configure it. I'm going to switch off Start on boot because we've got to do some other things here.Because of the way we're going to configure it, we have to cheat. So, we have to plug into the USB devices a USB device on Home Assistant. It can be anything. It can be anything that's going to be a serial device that we can make it pretend that it's setting up. You could use your MR3 if you're going to use that. That's what I'm doing.I've got it plugged into network and I'm using the power from the USB spot. So, that's what we're going to have to plug in, right?Quick aside: we're going to do something on Proxmox so Home Assistant knows about it. So, we got to do that first. So, let's flip over to Proxmox and do that.So, here we are in Proxmox. That's my server, my Home Assistant server. If I quickly click to the console—there you go, there's Home Assistant. If [snorts] we look at the hardware, what we want to do is add a new USB device.And I've got the MR3 plugged in because that's a serial device. I could use a mapped device, but that means knowing what you're doing. I could use a USB vendor/serial ID. Should we go for that one? Because it's the only thing plugged in so I know what it is. Or you can specify a port. I'm going to click Add on that.Now, sometimes it'll go through straight away and sometimes it won't. We'll find out in a minute. Okay, so that's added it. I might need to restart Home Assistant for it to recognize it properly, but we'll find out in a minute. So, let's flip back to Home Assistant.Okay, I've done a restart of Home Assistant and I've done a full reboot in Proxmox. You had to switch it off and on again.Now, there's an easy way to find things that don't seem to be mentioned anymore. You go down to Settings and then scroll down to System and go to Hardware and then All hardware. And it shows you all your hardware, and you're looking for something if you plugged a USB in that says USB.Okay, this one doesn't say USB, but it's embedded inside. So TTYACM0: ACM0 is a new serial port, which is the device that I've got plugged in. So, I know it's there now.So hopefully when we go into Settings, Apps, OpenThread Border Router, Configuration, there's one there. Okay, so we've got that in.What we then need to do is edit in YAML because we don't want to use this. We want to use the network setting. Now, I've got that in a file so I haven't got to remember it. Okay, and I am going to paste that in below baud rate: network device and the port. I'm going to click Save. Okay, it's reorganized it for me. That's nice of it. [snorts]So, if we go Info and we say Start on boot and go Start, okay, I think that is working because it is talking about it. This is how it's supposed to work.So, on the phone, I go to Home Assistant. I go down to Settings. [snorts] I go into Matter and I say Add device. I say, no, it's a new device. Open the camera here. Well, then because I can't quite get to the code, I need to scan the code, which it's now got.I plug it back in again and hold the button down for 10 seconds till it starts flashing. And then on the phone I say I'm ready. And it should say connecting to device. It's just there: connecting device to Home Assistant, and click Done.And we're back, and I've got an S4 connected and I can switch it on and off. You can't see that, but a little light's come on here. And a little light's gone off there. So, we're connected.So, if I go into Matter and switch off the other camera, [music] you can see there's the device. Quite happy. Now that's how it's supposed to work.