Wake Up Babe, New Connect ZBT Just Dropped
The new Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is here.
I just bought and setup the Connect ZBT-1 a few weeks ago... ðŸ˜
https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/11/19/home-assistant-connect-zbt-2/Open linkView original on lemmy.today
23 replies
I know some people really love home assistant, but not thaaaat much!
I need it to connect with a few other devices, uh, in range. This base will give me more confidence.
Before reading the community and comments, I was absolutely sure this was a shitpost
I’ve been running HA in a VM for a long time, and that VM can migrate between machines. USB is not the solution for me, I want that teased PoE unit. I’ve been running PoE powered Zigbee and Zwave units so that if my VM migrates the system doesn’t go down. It can also allow me to run multiple HA instances if I so choose (which would probably get complicated fast; I don’t do that)
That being said, this is great for anyone who isn’t a hardware tinkerer.
Now if we could just get more products in America that aren’t forced to use the cloud over WiFi…
Which POE units have you been using and what's your experience with them been like?
@ikidd
Currently SLZB-06M and Reolink RLC-810K cam. During my professional life I got to use a few POE devices, never a failure.
Is that slzb stable for you? I have one and it did all kinds of things, from losing connectivity to randomly changing its id, requiring re-pairing everything.
I have been waiting for them to release the Zigbee equivalent to their ZWA-2. Ordered one.
Does anybody use Zigbee directly in Home Assistant? I'm currently still on Zigbee2MQTT but I'm wondering if I should switch over to the Zigbee integration in Home Assistant.
Small house, I use zigbee directly with the zbt1 and it's great
Yeah I use ZHA, what would be the difference after switching over? Is one better or faster?
When they first released ZHA the interface was very barebones compared to Z2M. I saw the current Home Assistant interface in their stream on the ZBT-2 and it looks a lot more like a proper Zigbee interface now.
I don't think there is going to be much of a performance difference between ZHA and Z2M, mostly just how you interact with it.
Affirmative. Well I only used ZHA but came from Philips(Signify) Hue only system, so don't have much comparison but I did have some expectations. Overal setup and usage has been fine, but ofc N=1 and my setup is not your setup :) .
My setup: 2 floors, ~70m2 ~15 lights ~10 switches ~10 motion sensors
@domi
ZHA with 50+ devices from Ikea, Aqara, Frient and Hue over SLZB-06M. Works flawlessly.
Still have a ConBee 2 for zigbee and it works fine in my house. Although I do have a fair amount of smart plugs, that act as repeaters, around the house.
So only either Thread or Zigbee. Guess I’m gonna stick with my Sonoff dongles.
Interesting! I didn't know about: https://sonoff.tech/en-us/products/sonoff-dongle-max-zigbee-thread-poe-dongle-dongle-m
I currently have my ZBT-1 connected to my server way off in the corner of the house, which is obviously not great. I was hoping one day to move to a more central location... Maybe the Sonoff dongle would help with that? 🤔
@SkunkWorkz @paequ2 Yes, I also wondered about the advantage over my Sonoff dongle...
Is this gonna be better than the blue USB dongle sold as Thread and Zigbee but it couldn’t do both at the same time? I’m still annoyed at that
They are upfront about the fact that it will only do one or the other this time, at least...
Not only that, but they said they tried really hard but weren't able to make it work reliably (though they don't go into the reasons why).
@Archer
I still have Multiprotocol on SkyConnect, but only a dozen devices. Still didn’t bother to reconfigure.
My home server is currently in the center of the house, but I want to move it in the basement. I was looking into ethernet based coordinators, but there are so many. Does anybody have a recommendation for an ethernet capable alternative?
I’m using this one, it’s fine. The fact it has PoE makes it better for me than the ZBT2. After they’ve released ZWA I was sure they’d make a PoE capable Zigbee coordinator.