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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Smart button not near zigbee hub (lemmy.nz)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'd like to add a smart button to my HA setup. I don't have zigbee signal nearby, so I'm wondering what the best way to do this would be.

I'm using a Skyconnect dongle. There's wifi nearby. I want to control a smart switch nearby, which would also have zigbee but that also wouldn't reach the distance I need.

Is Matter a solution here? With a hub connected to wifi that bridges to the button?

Any suggestions on hardware?

Or any other suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

With an extender, it's essentially a second coordinator. But it's worth mentioning that a good Zigbee network is full of routing devices, so your network should be pretty far reaching anyway.

If the button you want to set up is far away from everything else, then WiFi or Bluetooth are definitely worth considering, because it is better to change batteries more often than be forced to add a bunch of devices to get one to work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the point of Matter that you can do this sort of thing? Have a separate zigbee network connection via a bridge that uses wifi? Is it worth using yet?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There's matter over WiFi and Matter over Thread, I've not heard of matter over Zigbee. The reason I mention it is because Matter is just how the things talk to each other, not how they talk to each other. Think like Spanish, over the Phone. Spanish being Matter. Your Sky Connect can already listen for via WiFi.

From all I've watched, Matter is still very rare and prone to dropouts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

My issue is that I have some devices near my skyconnect, and that works fine. But now I basically want a second zigbee network for the smart button and plug.

My understanding is that Matter solves this by allowing you to use a zigbee bridge. The bridge connects to zigbee to talk to the button/switch, and talks to home assistant over wifi (using the Matter protocol). That way you don't have to have the zigbee network continuous. I was watching part of Home Assistant's live steam the other day that explained it a little.

I guess it's still very early for Matter, so probably my best bet is to either extend the zigbee network or get a wifi button (or wait until Matter is more mature).

Thanks for the help 🙂