It came up in the discussion about smart home set-ups but is important enough to flag up in its own post as this can be the key ingredient in your smart home network.
Before deep diving into the list, it’s important to differentiate between the types of Zigbee dongles available.
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The easiest of the lot are USB Zigbee sticks, you simply plug them in your server and you are good to go. LAN/PoE coordinator allow for a more versatile installation, you can attach the dongle anywhere on your network. Hybrids are a combination of the two with interchangeable operation/power modes.
The second important difference between current Zigbee dongles is the type of chip they carry. The EFR32MG21 [Datasheet] is newer, more powerful but is still labelled as experimental in many Zigbee applications, such as Zigbee2MQTT. The CC2652P [Datasheet] is a bit older, although still relevant and powerful enough to form a sizeable Zigbee network. It’s supported in all Zigbee applications.
The top 5 dongles;
- Home Assistant SkyConnect
- Sonoff ZBDongle-E
- Sonoff ZBDongle-P
- SMLIGHT SLZB-02 Coordinator
- ZigStar Stick v4
There’s a lot more information over on the Smart Home Scene page (where I was looking something else up when I stumbled on this).
I was looking at the Sonoff ZBDongle-E but the SkyConnect’s future support for Threads was swinging it so I did a quick Google and ended back at Smart Home Scene which has an article on flashing the ZBDongle-E so it works with Threads, which is an advantage of the EFR32MG21 as it allows Zigbee and Threads, even if few have the update required to use Threads yet.
So that’s my question well and truly addressed and I’ll bang that order in.
Now I have to remember what I was in the site for in the first place.