N.B.: I’ve wasted hours on this thing, it’s far from plug and play.
My goal: create a new zigbee network and connect a few devices, primarily controlling power. In particulare, I want to reboot my Elgato Light whenever it looses network connectivity.
I’m not using the existing Philips Hue Zigbee network and their devices. The bridge is full and there are types of devices that Philips simple doesn’t provide, such as CO2 measuring devices.
I was hoping to buy an off-the-shelf ready-to-go plug-and-play Zigbee bridge, since my Home Assistant server is running on a machine unsuited to have a USB connected Zigbeed controller connected to it.
Here’s what I expected:
- Get a device, power it up
- Configure HA and the device to communicate
- Connect Zigbee device, configure automation in HA
All of that should be doable within an hour, I thought. I’m now four hours into troubleshooting and honestly realize I’ve been fooled by poor documentation, false advertizing of features, software upgrade that rendered the device unusable and an LLM.
The Story
The ZigStar UZG-01 seemed to be all the fuzz and talk of YouTubers with Home Assistant, so I got one. It was delivered within 24 hours from Elecrow - impressive!
After powering it up with PoE (yay!) I quickly found the device, assigned a permanent IP-address in my Dream Router. Reboot.
In the web UI for the UZG-01, I got prompted to update the firmware. “No problem, that’s pretty much common practice these days (Google Pixel, iPhones, Ubiquiti devices, etc). Let’s click Install!”.
After that, the device wouldn’t work. I read up on the official page on flashing/upgrading, no help. Had to reach out over Discord. Response 24 hours later: “connect with USB-C to reflash”. :frown:
Once I followed the guide on Zigbee2MQTT, things got cleared up and I could draw the picture below.
Zigbee Devices
|
|
UZG <--- IP (PoE) ---> z2m <--- IP/MQTT ---+
|
v
Mosquitto
^
|
HomeAssistant <--- IP/MQTT pub/sub --------+
Still haven’t gotten a single device to pair up … To be continued.