Installing Zigbee2MQTT on Home Assistant for Beginners

 I’ve put this together to help me remember the steps and also hopefully to help out other people struggling to setup this with Home Assistant as a complete beginner.

Zigbee2MQTT Hardware

First step is that you will need some form of hardware dongle to act as the Zigbee sniffer, this is instead of a SmartThings or Philips hue hub. I bought one off eBay for about £15 (in 2021).

This is the one I bought:

Plug it into your Home Assistant and then your are ready.

Install Zibbee2MQTT Software

For this to work we need two pieces of software we need the Zigbee2MQTT driver software and then we need the MQTT software.

First, the Zigbee2MQtt software, in Home Assistant:

Go to Supervisor > Add-on Store

Here we need to add a Repository by clicking on the 3 dot in the top corner.

In here paste in the following repository:

https://github.com/zigbee2mqtt/hassio-zigbee2mqtt

Beware you might see instructions for a reposiriioery from https://github.com/Koenkk this has now been depreciated and you should you use the official one above.

You will now see 2 options appear in the list:



Choose the first one, not the Edge version unless you know what you are doing.

Now click on Install, it can take at least 5 minutes sometimes.

Once installed select the option to Show in Sidebar as this will be useful.

You can now start it but it will fail, usually because the Mosquitto broker is missing. So the next step is to install the broker.

Install Mosquitto MQTT Broker for use with Zigbee2MQTT

This is very easy to do, go back to Supervisor > Add-on Store and find Mosquitto broker in the list, click on it and then click Install. Again it may take a couple of minutes to be installed.

Now click Start.

To configure the Mosquitti broker the next step is to add a user to Home Assistant. If you go to Configuration and then in the list you should have Users under Zones, if this is missing sscroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a message about missing options. Follow the link and turn on advanced mode.



Click Add User at the bottom of the screen and add the details, I go for MQTT User, mqtt,user and a nice strong password. Make a note of the user and password as we will need to add these to the setup. This user should not be an administrator.

Now we need to enter this into our Zigbee2mqtt configuration, choose Zigbee2mqtt from the left hand menu, ignore the error about starting and go to configuration at the top.

Under the mqtt: section we need to create 2 new parts for the credentials we just setup.



Save the configuration and then click Start to start-up the Zigbee2mqtt.

Now click the Zigbee2mqtt icon from the left hand menu and you should now see the Zigbeee2MQTT dashboard as below, if you don’t see this check the log for errors.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setup Shelly Relay with Home Assistant using MQTT

Image
  As I keep forgetting the steps I thouht I would write a quick guide on how to setup a Shelly relay with Home Assistant, in this specific case I am using a Shelly 1PM. This guide is going to assume that you have already wired up your Shelly relay and you have Home Assistant up and running, Connect Shelly to your local WiFi Firstly connect directly to the new Shelly relay by WiFi, if you scan your WiFi you should see something like Shelly1-xxxxxxx or Shelly1pm-xxxxxxx depending on which version. Now open the Shelly App on your phone and choose Add Device, making sure the WiFi connection specified in the app is the one you want to connect the device to. You should now see the new Shelly device discovered in the app if you go to discovered devices, check that you can turn it on/off in the app as expected. Set the Shelly Relay with the MQTT Server Settings For my setup I am using the MQTT platform because I couldn’t get the direct Home Assistant Shelly setup to work. I have the mosqui...
Read more

Home Assistant with Virgin Media SMTP Server

Image
  As it took a while for me to get the settings correct to enable me to send email alerts using Virgin Media in the UK, I thought I would document the process. Add a new user to Virgin Media First off add a new user to Virgin Media instead of using the main login for the account, this will make it to keep track of things and also interms of security, you don’t reeally want your Virgin account password stored in plain text on a device connected to the internet. Login to your account here: https://my.virginmedia.com/home/index Then go to My profile and choose Manage Accounts. Then click Create a new account. Choose a suitable First and Last name – I went for Home Assistant. Then pick an email address for the mailbox, I started mine with ha so I could easily know what it was. It must be at least 6 characters with no spaces or underscores. You can use . full stops though. Once that is confirmed, you will be promoted to set a password. Unfortunately Virgin Media wont accept a password l...
Read more