Zigbee2mqtt Bridge Beta

Very nice
Now all my bulbs are on the Hue bridge, moved from Hubitat, but I still have few sensors and plan to add more

Very nice
Now all my bulbs are on the Hue bridge, moved from Hubitat, but I still have few sensors and plan to add more

And that is the best place for them, adding lights that can act as routers (like Hue bulbs) is not a good idea as it will upset the mesh when someone turns the bulb off at the switch, zigbee is pretty resilient as can be seen by the zigbee mesh map but I know a lot of Hubitat users were having problems, especially if they only really had Hue bulbs for routing.

Yes, I had big problems with Hubitat, sometimes bulbs did not switch on/off.
I am using Hubitat only for motion sensors, but now I plan to move them away and add to this plug-in more sensors

Thanks a lot

I have all my hue bulbs in zigbee2mqtt now, and in hubitat before them (and z2m via Shims before that after I moved from the Hue hub)
You really shouldnt have a setup that allows smart bulbs to lose their power.
The hue bulbs work great as repeaters and ensure I get my zigbee mesh across my house, although I also have Innr bulbs and some sockets as well.
With z2m’s OTA I have finally got their firmware update from 4 years ago as well.

You really shouldnt have a setup that allows smart bulbs to lose their power.

I agree 100% but I am not allowed to change the light switches so having Hue as zigbee repeaters is not an option and I also like the Hue Lights plugin (but still get a 'disconnected' state when the switch is off)

When I changed to Zigbee2mqtt Bridge I first installed 6 dedicated Moes Zigbee Repeaters, they work very well and talk to each other and the Sonoff Zigbee stick, giving me a very stable mesh.

Just forgot to mention: the bulbs I have are not Hue, but are the LIDL ones which work fine with the Hue bridge.
I also have the in wall switch module so that I can control them from the wall switch. They will never lose the connection.

I will move from Hubitat sensors and maybe I will add some outlets so that they act as repeaters

Ah ok. I tend to use them in lamps and then have wireless switches to control them. Where there are wall switches the lights are automated or voice controlled and I use a zwave module in the switch to turn it back on if anyone ever turns it off!!


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I have it now up and running.
Next step: launch zigbee2mqtt at boot, how did you do it? With Launcher or within Indigo?

Thanks
Marco

I use PM2 which is a dedicated nodejs process manager, and has run and autostarted my node red for years.

https://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/quick-start/

Its a bit more fiddly for z2m as its starting in a VM but it should just be the below 2 commands once you have installed PM2 and are in the right directory

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source /opt/zigbee2mqtt/bin/activate
pm2 start index.js -n zigbee2mqtt

PM2 should then auto start after reboot and you can do the following to manage
pm2 list
pm2 restart zigbee2mqtt
pm2 stop zigbee2mqtt. etc

Its the main nodejs file that is run in the zigbee2mqtt folder.

I had a typo...now it works fine

Is this

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pm2 restart zigbee2mqtt

enough to have zigbee2mqtt to have it started at launch?

Thanks

It will autostart anyway. the

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pm2 restart zigbee2mqtt

command is just for restarting it whilst its running

use pm2 list to check its registered correctly.

This is the output

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macmini:~ homeautomation$ pm2 list
┌────┬────────────────────┬──────────┬──────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
│ id │ name               │ mode     │ ↺    │ status    │ cpu      │ memory   │
├────┼────────────────────┼──────────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
│ 0  │ zigbee2mqtt        │ fork     │ 1    │ online    │ 0%       │ 57.9mb   │
└────┴────────────────────┴──────────┴──────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────────┘

You are all good. Do a test and reboot and then run that command.. should show as online and zigbee2mqtt should be running.

Edit: running pm2 list is just to confirm its running... its not needed every time.

I have a question about the map; I added a motion sensor (battery powered) and 3 bulbs; I have at the moment range problem as the Zigbee controller is inside the rack (metal), therefore I need a longer cable; but one bulb is working; shall this acts as a repeater so that the other two bulbs also work? At the moment there is no connection between the the controller and two bulbs.