XiaomiGateway3 VS zigbee2mqtt

Following the recommendation from u/flaquito and u/CorgiFinancial, and since I did not want to spend any additional time or money on getting new hardware, I ended up with the following. - Booted up my old laptop, which hasn't been used for 2 years, and set up the docker version of HASS. It was indeed very straightforward. In hindsight, I might redo the process and install either a VM or the supervised version, just so I can have the addons (seems like a cool thing to have). - Adding all WiFi-related things was super easy! TV, PS4, Chromecast, etc. For Yeelight, I had to enable "LAN Control" to all my lamps. - The Xiaomi Smart Home Hub is not offered by default on HASS. I found a custom integration on hacs.xyz (adding HACS integration was also straightforward). The custom Smart Home Hub can be found [here](https://github.com/AlexxIT/XiaomiGateway3). - Enabling the telnet mode was non-trivial for me, as I did not want to change the Mi server to China (seems it loses all current setup?). Note that most online guides tell you to swap over to China to get the "About" menu option so you can enable the telnet. Instead, I found [this](https://gist.github.com/zvldz/1bd6b21539f84339c218f9427e022709), which worked like a charm with the custom integration: first add the gateway using the Mi credentials (it reads the mappings and tokens from the Mi Cloud), then add the gateway *again* by selecting the direct IP + the above definition. You can then delete the cloud-based gateway.

Have you considered Zigbee2mqtt[0]? You'd be running an extra program, but the docs are really good, it's pretty lightweight, and MQTT is incredibly easy to talk to from python or basically anything else.

[0] - https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)

This is definitely better than many of the alternatives but still not perfect. With Zigbee etc you end up locked into one or more of the ecosystems, not to mention some manufacturers implementing it in a way that has weird quirks (see [1]). With esphome you have a limited choice of devices (would love to see more), but you also usually end up locked into keeping a 2.4GHz WPA2 AP for your devices (and you miss out on mesh, but also the problems when it doesn't work...)

1: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/16717

I can recommend this: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

You can keep your Hue bulbs and devices but threw away the app, hub, and need to work with hue as an institution at all.

I got a $30 USB zigbee stick to replace the hub. works great!

It looks like it uses zigbee? If you have a server you could run zigbee2mqtt. You'd also need a zigbee dongle / adapter.

\also posted on the z2m* github device discussion board

If you want to use HA on your phone, you would need to install it on the pi, along with either ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT for the Zigbee network interface. Debian alone won't be able to interface with most of your smart devices.

I still haven't understood if the devices will change the path using the better route or not (since I've just tested a bTicino switch K4003C and it keeps using the worst path with 1 or 0 signal quality over a near Ikea repeater with a signal quality of 50).