Dual radio Zigbee & Thread coordinator - SMLight Tech SLZB-MR1

<p><strong>Dual radio Zigbee & Thread coordinator - SMLight Tech SLZB-MR1</strong><br><strong>Channel: BeardedTinker</strong></p><p>Are you ready? Because today we are going to look at something that I believe is currently the best coordinator for Home Assistant. And when I say coordinator, I didn't say Zigbee or Thread because yes, it can run both Zigbee Thread, two Zigbees, two Threads, or any way you configure it. So let's get cracking at the latest SMLight Tech device.</p><p>Let's first talk about obvious things first. This is a brand new SLZB-MR1 device from SMLight Tech and I received it for the testing purposes I believe almost five or even more months ago. And while the channel members did have chance to see a video about it some time ago, now I'm creating a video for all of you out there.</p><p>So what's so special about this device? You know that already created a couple of videos around four or five videos around SMLight Tech devices. First one featuring five coordinators or routers or anyway you configure them from SMLight Tech. But still for my main setup, I've kept my old Zigbee coordinator CC2652RB if I'm not mistaken or something similar.</p><p>This all changed when I received around New Year, Christmas time this device for the testing purposes and I'm really eager to share details with you because I do believe that this is currently the best device you can find on the market and I'll show you why.</p><p>Something that you maybe can see here that other SMLight Tech devices do not have is it has two radio devices. Two independent radio devices. They can be used either as Zigbee plus Zigbee or Zigbee coordinator and Zigbee router or Thread and Zigbee or any way you want to configure them.</p><p>I'm using it in a most preferred way and this is so that radio one which is EFR32 MG21 is configured as Matter over Thread and the second radio CC2652P7 is Zigbee coordinator. It allows me to hook up one physical device via the Ethernet cable. And yes, of course, it can do PoE. So, you can power it by the same Ethernet cable you're using for connection and have two coordinators inside Home Assistant.</p><p>Previously, whenever I wanted to have both Zigbee and Thread in any of my test setups, and this is also how I currently have other test setups, you need two coordinators. You would flash one firmware or one device with the Thread firmware and the other would be flashed with the Zigbee coordinator. By having one single device with two radios inside, you have two devices in one.</p><p>Now, a lot of you are going to say that yeah, but you have radio interference. Sure, you do. But don't you think that this hasn't been already solved? For example, your Apple speaker or your Google speaker or other hubs. They all have inside Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Matter, Thread, everything inside one really tiny box.</p><p>Having this device that looks almost the same as previous SMLight Tech devices actually has a plus over all the other hubs that are proprietary from either Apple or somebody else because it actually features two external antennas. So this device has something that other devices do not have.</p><p>Actually, this is not the only thing that is new with SMLight Tech, but I will not be going into details about other functionalities. Let's check out how you can configure it, how you set it up, how you add it to Home Assistant, how you edit and have everything working inside your smart home.</p><p>First things first, if you've seen any of SMLight Tech devices, you've seen screen like this. We have a dashboard where it has the general information. The only difference now is that we have radio one and radio 2. As I said, radio one is EFR32 MG21 device and radio 2 is CC2652P7. So we have Silicon Labs and also Texas Instruments chipsets.</p><p>All the other configuration options are more or less the same. You can use yes also Wi-Fi functionality. So you don't need to have PoE or Ethernet connected, but I really do recommend that you use Ethernet connection and especially if you have a PoE switch. But you can also hook up this device directly to your system by using the USB cable.</p><p>Then we have a device information. Here we can see three main parts of this device. We have core which is the heart or the core of the system. ESP32 device, two cores at 240 MHz, 16 megs of RAM memory, temperature, firmware version. Yes, I'm running dev version and also when was the last time the firmware was checked. Then we have information for the radio one and also radio 2.</p><p>As I said, I've hooked it up via the Ethernet. So my Wi-Fi status is off because I'm not using Wi-Fi to connect this device. We have Ethernet cable. It is connected. I'm not using DHCP. The address, submit mask, default gateway, connection speed, MAC address, and DNS servers.</p><p>Now comes the fun part. We click on mode. And we can see that we have two independent radios which was given away by two independent antennas and everything I've said before. First one is set as Matter over Thread but you can change it to coordinator or router. Anytime you change it, it allows you to go through the firmware update or firmware flashing where it will download the version that you want to download and set it up in any way that you want to set it up. For example, Zigbee coordinator, Zigbee router or Matter over Thread. Same applies to the radio too. This one from Texas Instrument is set as Zigbee coordinator.</p><p>One thing you have to note because we have two radios on a single IP address or single device we have different sockets and different socket ports have also different speeds serial port speeds. So for radio one we have socket port 6638 and for the radio 2 we have 7638. First one is 460800 speed and the other one is 115200. These are things that you will need to configure inside your Home Assistant no matter if you want to add them for example to Zigbee2MQTT or for example to ZHA.</p><p>You can enable Bluetooth proxy. Yeah, but I'm not going to do that because I want to utilize 100% of this device for the Thread and also Zigbee. As I said, you can set it up in either Ethernet connection, which is how I'm using currently. You can also set up the Wi-Fi connection. If you do not have Ethernet connection available there, or if you want to hook it up directly to USB, you can do so also here.</p><p>Then you also have one functionality which I said I will not be going in today and that is the Zigbee hub. Zigbee hub allows you to have many hub for the Zigbee devices directly on this coordinator. It allows you to add devices to this device and then publish them via MQTT for example to Home Assistant. So instead of using for example Zigbee2MQTT inside Home Assistant, you can have everything running on this device and then just hook this device via MQTT to Home Assistant if somebody would prefer to.</p><p>But I'm not going to cover this functionality in this video because in my opinion, this is secondary to what this device already has. Network section of course allows you to configure network settings, allow IPv6, disable MDNS, use SSC server on port 80, plus also configure DHCP and set up Wi-Fi if you need to set up Wi-Fi.</p><p>Of course, besides the mode part where we configure what each of the radios will be, coordinator, router or Matter over Thread or Thread over Matter. The next important functionality for Home Assistant is this one here, Zigbee2MQTT and also ZHA. If you want to configure any of the devices, you simply use the script provided here. But you will have to change part of the configuration depending on what types of the radios you are using.</p><p>For example, if you have Zigbee2MQTT, you click on here, copy this configuration here. But you need to be careful that you are selecting the appropriate radio. In my case, no, I'm not using the first one. I'm using the second one, second radio. So, this should be not 6638. Instead, it should be 7638. And the speed is not 460800. Instead, it is 115200. So, just be careful with this part of the configuration.</p><p>If you're using ZHA, use this configuration. Just be careful that you are selecting appropriate radio. Is it radio one or radio 2? And what sockets are you using for those devices?</p><p>If you want to customize something, you can change the settings for the EFR32 MG21 and also this CC2652P7. You can change the serial speed and also socket port. I had some issues when I first installed the device with the port 7638. So I did play and change the port, but later I reverted it back.</p><p>Then if you're also experiencing some issues, you can, but don't do it if you are not experiencing issues, enable this enable Zigbee socket bucket processing. It means that it is not sending individual packets. Instead, it is sending the full stream of the packets connected to some action. At least this is my understanding and also I've enabled by the recommendation of the developers allow multi-thread socket connection.</p><p>If for any reason you need to change the address of the device, you can do so here. But read carefully the documentation. And actually this here is the only information you need for your Home Assistant.</p><p>In terms of security, you can enable or disable, but be careful with what you enable or disable. Disable web server when socket is connected, enable web server authentication, enable IP white list for socket. This is something that I had issues with. Activate password fallback for Wi-Fi access point, etc.</p><p>VPN allows you to set up VPN WireGuard settings. I will not be going into details because I've created separate video on that. WireGuard is nice way of having this somewhere off site far away and then using internet to bridge that device to your Home Assistant or whatever you want to hook it up with.</p><p>One new functionality is scripts and automations since we already have hub. Of course, it was to be expected that we would have some kind of automation processing also done on this device. But I'm not covering Zigbee hub. So I will not be also covering scripts automations. You can easily add any script you want. Or you can check out the examples and also documentation on the link here.</p><p>And we have then settings and tools. For example, general settings where you set up the name of the device which is then used for the MDNS. You can restart Zigbee flash mode and also restart something that is now called SLZBOS. It's called SLZBOS because there are various SLZB devices and all are now using the unified UI. So it was about time that this device received its own OS.</p><p>Firmware update is used to update firmware of both of the radios. These here and also the core. For example, let's check for core update. I'm using this version here, version 2.8.5.dev7. This is the latest version. But if I want, I could revert to some previous version. Same as I've said applies to EFR32. We can flash the coordinator, router or Thread and also CC2652P7 coordinator router and also Matter over Thread.</p><p>You could potentially enable Zigbee automatic update, but I do not like that functionality. I don't want this device to auto update. I want to know if there is an update. Then I check the release notes. Then I wait a week or two to see if there are any issues in the GitHub repository. And if everything is well, then I update. Also, some devices really do not require update if everything is working. So, I prefer to have this one off.</p><p>You can control the LEDs. You can disable all the LEDs. You can turn on the LED night functionality or LED night mode where the LEDs would turn off between 11:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.</p><p>Then you have time settings where you set up the NTP server, your local time zone, etc., and also log and debug which you can then use to see or track if there are any potential bugs in the system. And that's pretty much it.</p><p>Now let's check out what you need to do to add it to Home Assistant. First off, we will be looking at the EFR32 for the Matter over Thread functionality. If you want to use Thread over Matter functionality, you need to install the add-on in Home Assistant, the Open Thread Border Router. This one is installed and already is configured and I have been using it for the last 5 months.</p><p>As far the configuration is concerned, you just need to specify the IP address and then add the socket port. So this is the IP address of the device and the port is 6638 which as we set and seen through the configuration is the socket for the EFR32. And that's actually it bow rate and this device option is not used if you specify the network device. I have automatically flash firmware off/on is on and not 64 is off. And as you can see it's up and running.</p><p>But besides the add-on the next thing you need to do is go to the add integrations and then install Open Thread Border Router. This one will be installed and it will directly hook up to the add-on you previously installed and it will provide integration between the add-on and also Home Assistant and by doing that you have Thread border router inside your Home Assistant.</p><p>As far as the ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT it's also very very simple. So, let's check what you need to do to add this device. For example, to Zigbee2MQTT. In the settings, add-ons, Zigbee2MQTT. For the configuration, you need to specify the port, in this case TCP, the IP address, and then port 7638, which is what we've seen in configuration for the radio 2 or the CC2652P7. Baud rate is specified at 115200. adapter is ezsp and the RTS CTS is set to false. This is the only thing you need to configure for this device to work inside Home Assistant.</p><p>And after you do that, you should have working Zigbee2MQTT set up and use this device. But this is not all since SLZB devices also have Home Assistant integration. Yes, in the integrations page, when you add this device and set it up inside your home, you should also see a pop-up notification that the new device was discovered, SLZB-MR1. If you of course didn't change the name of the device, and it will be recognized as SMLight SLZB device.</p><p>If you add it to Home Assistant, you should see something like this. One device with 25 entities. And as with everything else or all the other SMLight Tech devices here you have information about the firmware core and also Zigbee. But note that one of the firmwares is missing for the Thread. Here you can use controls to control or disable LEDs LED night mode and also enable or disable VPN.</p><p>As far as the configuration is concerned, we have auto Zigbee update which we've set to off or false. then you can update or see if there is a new firmware available. And for the Zigbee, we have two entities. This is currently the problem of the integration because it still hasn't been aligned with the latest release. In my opinion, you should see here something like radio one firmware and radio 2 firmware. One of them is up to date. The other one has the newer version. I'm not installing this March release because this is more of a beta release of firmware. So, I'm waiting for the next official release.</p><p>You can click here to flash the Zigbee module and also restart Zigbee module. Then inside diagnostics we have information about the type of the connection which is Ethernet. Core chip temperature core uptime. This is when was the last time device restarted. Internet connection is it connected or not. File system usage. Firmware channel I'm using development or beta version of the firmware. It's connected to the internet. RAM is this one here. VPN and Wi-Fi are disconnected.</p><p>Then we have information for the radio one and radio 2 chip. One is 32.7, the other one is 32.8. Then we have again radio one and radio 2 information. One is the Thread and the other one is coordinator. And the Zigbee uptime, which again we don't know if this is for the radio one or radio 2, but we see that it is same as the core uptime.</p><p>But the question is okay, you have one device with two radios or multi-radio. Is it actually any good? I don't know if you've missed something at the beginning of the video or not, but I am now using this device with two radios inside as my main Zigbee coordinator device plus also my open border Thread router. Two devices, two networks inside one device on a small footprint and they really work awesome.</p><p>CC2652P7 from the Texas Instrument is great SoC and in the last year year and a half the firmware for it was improved. We now have much higher decibel gain. It has advantages over the previous radio models. So this one is one of the best SoCs for the Zigbee coordinators currently on the market.</p><p>Then on the other hand we have EFR32 MG21 which has been proven for the Thread network but also if you want you can use it as a Zigbee coordinator. So no matter what you want to do if you want to evolve your system and we all know that the multi-protocol support will not be back officially for the SkyConnect or any device because unfortunately it had such a lot of errors inside their bugs. This is the only way for you to have one device with multi-protocols or for example use both as Zigbee coordinators and then run in parallel both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT.</p><p>While we are already talking about that warning and this is something that I unfortunately got triggered on some people say but yes you can use one coordinator Ethernet coordinator and then point it to both ZHA and also Zigbee2MQTT sure but things that you can do are not the same as things you should do. If something is currently working for you it's by mistake. This is not something that is recommended because each of those platforms or ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT requires exclusive access. If you give access to both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT that is not exclusive access and it can break. You can have errors and then you would blame for example Aqara for bad devices or Sonoff for bad devices and actually it would be your fault to use one coordinator in two integrations.</p><p>By using device like this you overcome the hurdle. You do not have multi-protocol support. you have two radios, possibly multi-protocols in a single device.</p><p>At the time of the recording of this video, unfortunately, the first batch of devices was sold. There are still some available, at least there were on April 26 on the links that you can find on their website, but the new batch should be available around mid of May.</p><p>If you already have working SLZB device, you do not need to replace it. Any SLZB device should be sufficient. But if you want to have multi-protocols or multi-radios, you would need to have two devices. If you are looking for a replacement of your device because you're using ConBee or you're using CC2531, then this is definitely something that you should consider.</p><p>I'm not saying that this is the only option. I'm just saying that this device here in April 2025 is the best available device on the market. Maybe somebody else will release similar device. Yes, there are other devices that have similar setup but they are closed ecosystems. I've already mentioned for example Aqara device where you have stick that has inside all the protocols that exist on the planet earth but this is proprietary ecosystem and you could not hook this up to Home Assistant and use this Aqara stick to get everything that you would for example with this one here.</p><p>There is other documentation on the website and I do recommend that you check out the link below. Check out the documentation. For example, read about where the SLZB-MR1 design comes from. Should Zigbee and Thread coexist in one device, where it coexist, etc.</p><p>And this is it for this video around SLZB-MR1 device or multi-radio one device. I really do hope that you did find this video interesting. And if you did, don't forget to give it a thumbs up because it really means a lot to me and you also wouldn't believe how much time went into preparing and testing everything. So just a thumbs up from you really, really means a lot.</p><p>If you have any kind of a comment, question, idea, if you found some device that looks or works similar as this one, please drop me a link down below because maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe there is some kind of multi-radio device already in the market that can be used same as this one inside Home Assistant.</p><p>And before I end up the video, I want to say thanks to all those wonderful people that are supporting me and that have become YouTube channel members. Thank you all for all of your support. But let's not forget each and every one of you who has watched, shared, commented, and liked my videos. Thank you.</p><p>If you too want to support the channel, you can do so by clicking the join button down below and becoming a YouTube channel member for only €2 or $2 per month. Or you can go to my merchandise store and get something there. Last but not least, you can always send me super thanks and I will be super thankful for that. I will be seeing you next time. Until then, bye-bye and have fun.</p>