I’m excited – as you’ll see below I have left my new SMLight SLZB-06 ETHERNET Zigbee coordinator in the UK – working well (but not at all stressed) and I have one coming to Spain this coming week. That leaves the question – what to do with my Sonoff-P and Sonoff-E USB Zigbee dongles – see the next post..
I’ve now been using various serial adaptors (Sonoff and others) for Zigbee2MQTT on my Raspberry PIs (4 then 5) for a long time – not perfect but they work – and only this month found myself in our second home (overseas in the UK) with a conundrum – I have no central home controller here but access my RPi in Spain using Tailscale VPN. Here in the UK I have a couple of Sonoff Zigbee temperature sensors and have been using an NSPanel Pro here to access them locally and remotely.
Aside from being a little over-the-top to use the NSPanel Pro for a pair of sensors, I’ve been looking to add more sensors and light controls – but the idea of being bound to only Sonoff for Zigbee doesn’t appeal as I also regularly use Aqara and other sensors, not supported by NSPanel Pro.
Coincidentally I was reading about the SMLight SLZB-06 Ethernet Zigbee coordinators readily available from AliExpress.. and I wondered if it would be possible to use one of these instead of the NSPanel Pro. That immediately started me thinking of another Raspberry Pi and Zigbee dongle + PSU etc., which kind of defeated the point.
And then it hit me, could I possible use my RPI in Spain, which, thanks to Docker, can easily support a second instance of Zigbee2MQTT – but if I went down the SLZB-06 route, would it be possible to connect said SLZB-06 to the remote RPi5? I looked at the base model as I don’t have POE and hence could use USB for power.
As it turns out, a pal of mine managed to get one of these units for me and so 2 days later I hooked the unit into my UK network.
After updating to the latest firmware, I spun up a second instance of Zigbee2MQTT over in Spain thanks again to Tailscale and a Mobaxterm SSH session. I made this second instance a clone of the first but then went into the configuration file and changed the serial dongle reference to the IP address of my new Ethernet device. We also changed the port for accessing the Ziggbee2MQTT web interface from default 9099 to 9199. Within a matter of minutes we had the new device working – leaving only the pairing of my 2 sensors. As usual thanks to my pal Antonio in Italy for his remote help in setting this up.
I have to say I was skeptical at first but here I am in the UK, armed with only the SLZB-06 locally talking to my sensors and of course as it is talking to Zigbee2MQTT back in Spain, it will be no problem to add in, say, some Aqara Zigbee sensors next time I’m here. Already I can see the range is better than my serial dongle back home – just as well, as I have at this time no other mains Zigbee devices here in the UK to act as routers/extenders.
Unlike the serial dongles which had to be on USB extenders to stop the dongle interacting with the RPi WiFi, no such issue with the SLZB-06 which is conveniently placed on a wall – even easier with the POE version but I have no POE here so I used the handy USB output on my 4G router.
On returning to Spain I’m now waiting for another SLZB-06 for the Spanish end – good gadget and VERY easy to use.
I’ve heard of these adapters, and I’m really thankful for your review. I think I’ll add one to my kit! Thanks!
Hi
I’m not on ANY commission for these Ethernet devices, my friend gave me one. So I contacted the company to tell them I was impressed and they wrote back today – very helpful chap – by early next week I’ll put more information in that blog entry as I plan to replace my existing Spanish dongle with one of the samples and a router (ie repeater – ie a Zigbee smart plug) in the middle of our house with the other one – which I’m led to believe should have better range than a typical smart plug due to the large antenna. At that point I’ll know for sure if you have to re-add existing Zigbee units to Zigbee2MQTT or not. Meanwhile, it seems that right now their prices compare with AliExpress – worth a look – https://smartlight.me/smart-home-devices
Pete
no need to readd or repair anything, this video shows everything needed to move devices between different coordinators:
I used this very video to do mine and it was super easy
even if you don’t have poe on router itself, you can use some poe injectors to feed in power to the socket which brings on the other side to where you put the device, so that EXIT port has both data and power… they exist even in the other way around, called poe splitters
plug in source network cable and power on the injector, and the cable on the other side will be POE
If I understand correctly, the SLZB-06 is in the UK and your pi, which is talking to it, is in Spain ?
If so…
Is your SLZB just plugged into your UK 4G router ? And I assume that if not using PoE then there is a USB power socket on the device which you’re hooking up to your router USB ? (seen a side image of the SLZB with a USB socket).
And are you using tailscale to allow the Spanish pi to talk to the SLZB over IP ?
Trying to visualise it…
Yes, the SLZB-06 is in the UK and my RPI5 is in Spain. SLZB is not on my 4G router as that does not have Tailscale. It is plugged into my normal router which gets it’s external connection from the 4G router. My normal routre is a GL-iNet Flint – which has Tailscale as a standard install. The SLZB-06 has a USB-C connection for power and upgrades. It WAS plugged into the outside routre USB connection but I’ve just replaced that with a TP-Link MR600 4G router which has no USB connector so the SLZB-06 is now getting power from a bog-standard 1A USB wall adaptor. Tailscale links the two networks together so each can access the other. As there is only me messing with networks in our homes this doesn’t pose any extra risks.
OK, got it!
I use an old Plusnet router with OpenWRT flashed on it as a Wifi access point in my garage. I installed a Tailscale client on that so I can access my local LAN remotely.
I’ve got a PI 4 with HA on it plugged into the same router and use a Sonoff Zigbee USB stick for my zigbee comms.
When I upgraded the pi SD card install to a SSD the zigbee comms dropped off completely. So I put the SSD on the end of a USB extension cable and zigbee comms restored.
So it would seem that the SSD frequencies interfere with zigbee.
P.S. The CAPTCHA on posts is a right pain! I enter the “correct” value and it’s rejected. There’s no “refresh” so I have to cut my post, refresh the entire page to get a new CAPCHA, paste in the post and try again…
A) Yes, USB3 and Zigbee do seem to interfere – I learned that the hard way. Ended up ensuring the SSD had a proper shielded cable and shielded plug – and still put the Zigbee dongle on a long (shielded) lead. Hopefully a thing of the past if I get another Ethernet unit…
B) I now have a spare 4G router which I can then plug into a normal GL-iNet router with OpenWrt and hence TailScale – sadly my 4G OpenWrt-based GL-iNet Spitz 2 router simply doesn’t have enough storage to add TailScale (their newer routers do) – I’ve asked GL-iNET if there’s a way to remove un-necessary rubbish to make way for Tailscale – no answer yet. As it happens, for now in the outbuilding that has the tiny 4G router – I only have one socket device and it’s a Tuya phone-home job so I can control it with the APP for now.
The plain 06 model does not, I believe, do POE. All models are pretty similar apart from POE and chipset.