If anyone bought the previous one, how was it and what do you think about this upgrade?
Excerpts:
The easiest way to start with Zigbee or Thread just got even better, with Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2. This USB adapter plugs into your Home Assistant system and opens up a world of smart device options. Between its precisely tuned antenna and next-generation chip, it’s a big step up for anyone looking to connect Zigbee, Thread, or Matter devices directly to Home Assistant.
For all our Zigbee fans, this might be the best upgrade you’ll make all year. We’ve squeezed every inch out of this technology, giving it the best range, speed, and stability possible. The same can be said for our Thread-heads out there (yeah, I just came up with that cool nickname 😎), making Matter or ESPHome Thread connections rock-solid. Pick whether to dedicate your Connect ZBT-2 to run a Zigbee or Thread network, and it’ll provide the best experience for that protocol (and if all these names just sound like new streaming services to you, check out our explainer below).
If you’re one of those people still rocking three different hubs, what are you waiting for… another giant server outage to take down your smart home? Ditch those cloud hubs and take back your privacy today. As an added bonus, your devices will likely get more controls, range, and resilience.
Available today starting at $49 and €45 (that’s the MSRP, and pricing will vary by retailer). Designed and built by Nabu Casa and the Open Home Foundation, every purchase helps fund the development of Home Assistant. For quick specs, details, and where to buy, visit our beautiful Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 page.
Open Design
When we say open, we mean it. In the physical sense, it’s easy to open Connect ZBT-2 as there are no clips or glue, just some lovely standard Phillips head screws. The board has a gorgeous silkscreen, which explains all the chips, exposed pins, and pads.
The bootloader is unlocked, and all the firmware we build is open source and available to modify. We’ve also built a new website that makes it easy to flash the stock firmware, and in the future, experiment with new firmware. We’ll also be providing the PCB and outer casing files if you want to tinker with those. Openness makes our products better… literally, since our community helps us find and fix bugs.
Unfortunately it doesn’t support zigbee 4 (which was just announced) or PoE.
They are on it:
Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 supports Zigbee 3.0 (and yes, we’re looking at Zigbee 4.0 support as well) and is keeping pace with Thread’s rapid development.
Why would a USB accessory need PoE?
Zigbee 4 support lacking in it is disappointing.
PoE needs to be more prevalent, IMO. When Smlight came out with the SLZB I jumped on it. Not only does it give me options for where to place it in my house, but it also allows me to make HA more resilient on my Proxmox cluster because it isn’t tied to a single node with USB passthru.
I know that this probably is an edge case and that the HA team wants to make things easier with the HA green and HA yellow so USB still makes sense, but if this or the SWA-2 had PoE as an option, it would have been a no brainer.
I’m happy with my ZWA-2
I actually upgraded from a Conbee stick to the official home assistant one to support them… But the official home assistant one is significantly worse.
A few devices like buttons were discovered by the Conbee and worked perfectly fine, but the home assistant refuses to recognize their functionality.
Since I already migrated all my devices, I am not going back, but I would recommend anyone against purchasing the official home assistant sticks. Get the cheaper stuff instead.
buttons were discovered by the Conbee and worked perfectly fine, but the home assistant refuses to recognize their functionality.
That’s not the hardware stick; that’s the controller software stack. Sounds like you switched from deConz to ZHA to go with the hardware change. In which case, this is all fixed by using Zigbee2MQTT instead of HA’s built-in ZHA. Z2M supports more hardware and features than ZHA.
Yes probably but ZHA worked fine with the Conbee stick and I do not feel like migrating. I like the simplicity of ZHA a lot, it is simple to add devices. With the deConz software it supported all the buttons too. I am sad that ZHA has such poor software support it should not be that difficult in my mind.
A smart dildo?
I like that they incorporated a flared base
The version with the rounded top is the smart dildo.
When running HA in docker-compose, does this remove the need for zigbee2mqtt and mosquito?
No. This is the hardware to connect to the devices. You still need something, like ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT to manage it in Home Assistant.
As far as I understood, this is just a USB interface, you’d still need zigbee2mqtt or ZHA
I’ve dont know the andere to your question, but I’ve just read that you can run into problems with the hardware running under docker: https://meow.social/@SebinNyshkim/115589684927757960
The link seems to say Threads support is only available as an add-on and therefore not simple to use with containerised HASS. This would be true for any Threads antenna though.
You’re right. It seems that you need the “OpenThread Border Router add-on”:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread#to-make-home-assistant-your-first-thread-network
Was hopeful to get a zigbee and threads coordinator. Sadly, it’s an „or“ not an „and“.
I need threads support, so I will probably get it anyway. But it’s just an evolution, not a revolution.
On a previous thread, someone pointed to https://sonoff.tech/en-us/products/sonoff-dongle-max-zigbee-thread-poe-dongle-dongle-m
Looks like it might support both.
I believe some of the newest offerings by SMLIGHT can also do both.
All of the MR devices AFAIK. It’s working mostly well so far. But my scope is limited as I have only one thread device so far. The bigger benefit for slzb devices is that they are wholly decoupled from the machine running zha/z2m, plus PoE, wifi and BLE proxies are nice features. The downside is, it’s not open hardware.
It’ll probably be great. That’s pretty much giaranteed based on the physics. That said, if you already have a mesh that has good connectivity, an antenna like this would probably just reduce the latency a bit. If you have latency-sensitive applications. I use an HA Yellow with its built-in Zigbee radio. It only reaches 5-10m. Everything after that is connected through the mesh.
I bought the ZBT-1 a few months ago. My only complaint is that they made it as a usb stick then said keep it away from the usb port. It did come with an extension cable, so I’ve always had it connected that way. Otherwise, no complaints here. It seems to reach what it needs to. I’m using it for matter over thread devices. The closest thread IoT device is only about six feet away, so it didn’t need to be super strong to connect and control my thread network of devices.
As for the upgraded device: Moving away from the usb stick makes sense. With that said, I’m not much of a fan for this new design. I don’t have any intentions of getting the zbt-2 anytime soon.
Did they remove Z-Wave or did it never have it?
Never had it. Z-Wave needs a differrnt antenna and since they’re using full-size antennas for these devices, the Z-Wave one is significantly larger so it’s a separate device.
Not sure what you mean by this - Nabu Casa has a Zwave device already called ZWA-2 which is fully supported.
What benefit does this have over a Zigbee dongle on Amazon that’s cheaper? Would the advantage be that this is a 3-in-1 dongle?
In addition to these guys knowing what they are doing and pushing firmware updates straight through Home Assistant, every purchase also supports the Open Home Foundation.
I’m pretty sure you can achieve similar performance with cheaper dongles.
I worked through three zogbee dongles from Amazon including the sonoff one.
Always had issues with my mesh. Upgrading to the one provided by Nabu guys (the v1) fixed them all and it’s been almost one year rock solid now. No more disconnection or better devices losing it
