Episode 2 – SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 as a Zigbee Coordinator in Home Assistant

<p><strong>Episode 2 – SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 as a Zigbee Coordinator in Home Assistant</strong><br><strong>Channel: Tinker Tut</strong></p><p>Hello channel and welcome back to the second episode of our series. In this episode, we are going to talk about the Zigbee controller of the SLZB-MRW10 and discuss how we get that into Home Assistant.</p><p>So before we start, I want to talk about the Wi-Fi problems. When I started my smart home journey, I went on with Wi-Fi smart devices. But this led to a problem, a congested Wi-Fi mesh system. I started to find issues and feel issues in my connectivity. So I really wanted to start by offloading some of the devices or at least the new ones into a Zigbee mesh system.</p><p>I started with a Combi 2 USB Zigbee stick to cover the second floor. I had a couple of lights that I can control nicely and they have been doing great. But now I wanted to add more coverage of Zigbee network into my ground floor. So I added the <strong>SLZB-MRW10</strong> which not only supports Zigbee but also Z-Wave or you can change the Zigbee controller into Matter over Thread but that's for the next episode.</p><p>Okay, so what do we have here? First, let's do a quick test on running all of these in parallel. So, we'll start with our Combi Stick Zigbee controller, which is connected to Home Assistant Raspberry Pi. And let's control this Philips Hue Go, which is Zigbee controlled. And next, let's control our water timer via the <strong>SLZB-MRW10</strong> Zigbee controller. So, we have this on our dashboard as well. So, let's go ahead and try that out. This one might take some time because of the congestion or sorry, the interference of the multiple Zigbees plus Wi-Fi I have, but it works fine. And last, let's test the Z-Wave Plus also in parallel. Great. So, they are all working in parallel, working fine. Of course, this is in the lab, so the interference will not happen when we put them in each floor. So in real life scenario, we won't have any issues.</p><p>Okay, so far so good. So now I want to talk about ZHA in native integration in Home Assistant. This is where I have my Combi stick mesh controlled. So you can see here I can update my Hue bulb. It is connected via the ZHA as I mentioned. It is working via the Combi stick. It has been rock solid. Really good device. Can view the network. Here I have just three lights in the second floor and no issues no complaints whatsoever. But you can only have one controller in ZHA. That's why we are going to integrate the <strong>SLZB-MRW10</strong> with the Zigbee2MQTT. You can have as many Zigbee2MQTT add-ons as you wish to control multiple SLZB devices as you wish.</p><p>Okay. So now let's go ahead and integrate our SLZB Zigbee radio via the Zigbee2MQTT integration. Let's go to add-on store. Search for it. You will not find it by default. So what you need to do is you need to go to this URL and then install the add-on repository. Click add to repository and then open. Then add the repository and then if you search again for it, you will find it. Zigbee2MQTT. You also need to have the MQTT integration installed in Home Assistant.</p><p>Okay, let's start the add-on. All right, it started successfully. Let's check the log onboarding pages available. This is the first time setup of your device. So let's open web UI. Here you need to configure your device. You see it found the USB Zigbee stick which we are not going to use. We are going to use our SLZB device. So if you go back to the SLZB OS web page, you go to the Zigbee2MQTT configuration page and then you will find it says okay if you want to use the Zigbee2MQTT add-on it's better to do it via YAML. It's not necessarily needed. So you can just copy paste the port and the adapter and the baud rate and go back here to the onboarding. Paste that. It's just three things you need to do and you're good to go. And this is where you forward the MQTT messages and submit that. It is starting. So far so good. Let's go back to add-ons. Zigbee2MQTT and then wait for it to get started.</p><p>Okay. So, you can see the TCP socket is open. It started successfully connected to our MQTT server. This is where it publishes the messages. Open web UI and let's go to map and this is where you will see our controller is online. No devices yet but that's okay.</p><p>All right. So now that we have our controller up and running in Zigbee2MQTT it's now time to add our Zigbee devices. So, first let's go to the Zigbee2MQTT UI and let's add some batteries to our devices. So, I'm going to start with this irrigation water timer. It is a Zigbee 3.0 device and as per documentation and feedback, it is compatible with Zigbee2MQTT. So let's get this one in pairing mode. And now we have three soil moisture and humidity sensors. We need to permit join. And then we will immediately find our water timer auto discovered and auto configured as well by the add-on which is great. And now the first soil sensor is also now auto discovered. And the second one it takes some time of course for the auto configuration to get the vendor details and the icon and all of that stuff. And now the third one as well.</p><p>Okay. So, it seems that one of the soil sensors is acting up. So, we will need to look into manual configuration for that one or manual pairing I'm sorry. And yes, that was the issue. So, it is discovered now with manual pairing. So, so far so good. We are we have all the devices up and running. So I'm so far happy.</p><p>So let's check our Zigbee mesh map now. We see the three sensors. We see the water timer and our controller. They do have unfriendly names. So we need to fix that. First let's also go and check some parameters. We can turn on and off the valve of the water timer. This is pretty responsive. And let's also check the state of the device options. So valve one is off. Valve two is null. Okay. Let's turn on valve one manually and see the state. So valve two is on. Correct. Valve one. Turn it on. The state is on. So that's good. Pretty fast, pretty responsive. No complaints. And the liquid, sorry, the soil sensors are reporting all of these passive readings. So also good.</p><p>And that's about it, folks, for our test of the Zigbee radio on the <strong>SLZB-MRW10</strong>. No complaints. It's working fine, smooth. Everything is looking good. And now I'm going to proceed with renaming these devices for a more descriptive name. Obviously, this is of course up to you where you're going to place the devices. So, I'm going to call this pot one for my garden and pot number two. Of course, these are important because they will reflect in your Home Assistant entity IDs where later you will have your automations and sensors and all of that stuff. So, it is very nice to have.</p><p>And this is our map again but now with proper namings. We can see also the link quality indicators having pretty strong signal. But this is in the lab of course. So we are yet to see the real world deployment and my MQTT integration has all of the devices with all of the sensors. So we can again trigger and see everything there.</p><p>Thanks for watching everyone. This was it for episode number two and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks for watching and make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet. Bye.</p>