Home Assistant best with Zigbee
For me, Home Assistant works best with Zigbee: with Zigbee, you turn your Home Assistant into a complete and efficient smart home. While your Home Assistant server acts as a coordinator, Zigbee is the wireless standard that acts securely, quickly and efficiently with your various components. In particular, the Zigbee standard is very energy-efficient and components such as motion detectors or temperature sensors can operate for two years or more without battery replacement.
What is Zigbee?
ZigBee is an energy-efficient and versatile smart home wireless protocol designed for smart buildings and the Internet of Things (IoT). It was developed for the transmission of small amounts of data and with a view to minimal energy consumption and is used by various major manufacturers. These are already several reasons why Home Assistant is best used together with Zigbee.
The ZigBee protocol was developed by the ZigBee Alliance as the lead organization. The most well-known manufacturers that support ZigBee include Philips, General Electric, Innr/Ledvance (Osram/Lightify), Huawei, Somfy, Amazon, Ikea, Honeywell, Busch-Jaeger, Jung, Gira, Bosch, Samsung, Kärcher, Siemens, Telekom, Velux and ZTE.
Why Home Assistant is best used with Zigbee?
Home Assistant is the coordinator in your smart home and provides the logic for automations. However, it should be noted that Home Assistant primarily communicates with other components via LAN or Wifi. However, Wifi is not very efficient and also prone to interference if suddenly a lot of devices are running on a home network. Likewise, the energy consumption is very high and thus requires a regular change of the battery or even a constant power connection. Zigbee fixes all of these drawbacks and makes adding components to your smart home very easy. Also, you are completely independent of a power outlet, since the Zigbee devices usually do not require electricity. Of course, smart sockets are connected to the power supply and even act as repeaters. This allows the range of the Zigbee network to be significantly increased once again. This then covers every corner of the house or even the outside area.
Integration of Zigbee with Home Assistant is very simple. There are several ways to do this, which I will describe in a separate article. Subsequently, all possible components can be integrated quickly and easily and, of course, also controlled. Not only simple switching on or off is possible, but also the color or brightness of the bulb can be changed.
Why not Wifi?
The WiFi network is basically not very energy-efficient, since a constant connection between component and router is needed. Although a standby is theoretically possible, it always requires a new connect to the WIFI before a command can be transmitted. Zigbee does not have this weakness and acts very energy efficient. At the same time, the battery can last for more than two years.
In addition, the WIFI network is basically also not designed for a very high number of components to be active. This leads to the fact that errors can occur and commands are not transmitted. In short, WIFI is not designed for a smart home and that is why it should not be used for it.
What is the range of Zigbee?
As with WiFi and Bluetooth, the radio range is between 10 and 20 meters depending on the transmission power and the structural environment – under ideal conditions, up to 100 meters are theoretically possible. The maximum achievable data transfer rate is 250 kilobits per second (kBit/s). This is significantly lower than with the 802.11 WLAN standards for transmitting large amounts of data, but is very sufficient for control tasks in the smart home and for transmitting status messages. You can use ZigBee for all types of living spaces, houses and commercial spaces. Normally, there is no interference with other electronic devices. Computers, WLANs, alarm systems and cordless phones are usually not disturbed. This allows you to integrate all the necessary components even in a large house of home assistant best with Zigbee.
How does mesh work with ZigBee?
The mesh network model is an important part of the Zigbee protocol. In the mesh model, all devices communicate with each other to form a network that allows data to be transferred from any device to any other device on the network. Each device in the network can also act as a repeater, forwarding the data and thus increasing the range of the network. In this way, Zigbee devices can form a very reliable and robust wireless network.
How secure is ZigBee?
Zigbee is a wireless communication protocol designed to provide a cost-effective and energy-efficient way to network devices. In terms of security, Zigbee provides some important safeguards to ensure that data transmitted from Zigbee devices cannot be intercepted or tampered with by unauthorized parties. These include encryption technologies that prevent data from being transmitted in plain text, as well as mechanisms for authenticating devices and users.
Who invented ZigBee?
Zigbee was developed by a consortium of companies and organizations called the Zigbee Alliance. This consortium was founded in 2002 by a group of companies interested in developing a standard for wireless communication of devices. Zigbee Alliance members work together to ensure that the Zigbee protocol is continually improved and developed to meet the needs of users.
This makes Zigbee an easy and cost-effective way to integrate components into Home Assistant. This is how Home Assistant works best with Zigbee.
