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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

You can do that with Zigbee? That sounds fantastic, but the Conbee is a bit pricy still.

Look at the Sonoff line of devices, they're all ESP8266-based and extremely hackable (all mine run custom firmware, Espurna).

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Yeah you can. You can get something like a CC2531 which works great aswell. Not sure If it's supported by ZHA yet but https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ worked very good with my CC2531. I just switched to the Conbee because it was supported by ZHA and I wanted my lights etc to directly connect to Home Assistant with ZHA.

The CC2531 looks dirt-cheap, Ali stocks it for $2. What's ZHA? I saw it mentioned in the article but don't understand why the CC2531 doesn't work with it. I was thinking of buying an ITEAD Zigbee bridge, but I don't know whether that will work with ZHA or why I'd want it to...

ZHA is Zigbee Home Automation. It's basically the part of Home Assitant that deals with zigbee devices. So it's like first party vs something like zigbee2mqtt which then hooks into Home Assitant.

Makes a little less work configuring etc, but not all Zigbee sticks are supported. Check support here

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/#known-workin...

Ahh, so it's a HA thing. The ITEAD gateway is explicitly listed as supported, so that seals it. Their stuff has always been stellar, thank you for the info.

Yeah, it's really cheap, but 8051 which is quite cumbersome to work with imho.

Oh, what's the difference? Also what's the alternative?

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