2w ago

Question about the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1

Hello everybody,

Im currently planning on migrating my smart home to Home Assistant and run the HA docker image on my home server.

Most of my devices communicate via Zigbee so I was thinking of getting the Connect ZBT-1.
I also have a few Matter/Thread devices which would be nice to integrate as well, although not necessarily in the initial migration.

I read the ZBT-1 can experimentally be used with Thread as well. Now my question is: Is it possible to buy two devices and connect to Zigbee and Thread devices simultaneously?

Maybe someone has a similar setup and would like to share their experience.

Thanks in advance and have a nice weekend!

7 comments

Yes you can use two dongles one for each but personally I think it’d be confusing for ports and configures. I’d go for one of those ABS over SMlight, they’re great and have brilliant software. Bonus being they’re Ukrainian too.
Personally I have an smlight 06, sonoff p and a zbt. They’ve all been solid

I only have the one ZBT-1 at the moment, but like you I was also thinking about getting a second for Thread (though in the form of a HA Yellow). There's this bit in the documentation for the Yellow about multiprotocol support and one of the things is that it's better to have a second wireless chip in some cases which I take to mean that you can have multiple ZBT-1, one for Zigbee and one for Thread.
For large networks it is advisable to add a second wireless chip. This allows to run Zigbee and Thread each on a dedicated wireless chip and on separate channels.
(source: https://yellow.home-assistant.io/guides/about-multiprotocol/)
- Thanks for the link, I think it indeed looks best to use a second one then (I think I'll do some more research though). But it's interesting to see (in case of the Yellow) you could theoretically use one device for both if they operate on the same channel.

I can't say how using 2 ZBT-1's at the same time will work out but I can say they work great for Thread/Matter.
There shouldn't be an issue getting both up running as long as you know which ZBT-1 is assigned to which port.
- Thanks for your answer, that sounds promising!

I never had any luck with zigbee USB dongles. All my devices would just continually fall over and it was a massive pain getting them back talking. Someone ended up recommending me the Zigstar UZG-1 which is a network Poe device, and I have never had a problem since. It has been up and problem free now for about half a year.
As it isn’t plugged into your device, you should also eliminate the issue trying to get it to work in docker

Vaguely remember that the dual stack firmware wasn't being developed anymore and was deprecated.

7 comments