Zigbee support?

I was wondering what the situation is with Vera and Zigbee. Recently there are several affordable devices that have come on the market (Ikea’s Trådfri and Xiaomi’s devices). My understanding is that these use the Zigbee protocol.
I was wondering whether any work is being done to support these natively in Vera. Or what would it take to get these supported. They then to be much cheaper than the Z-Wave alternatives, so it would be nice to be able to use these.

You need to make sure to understand that zigbee is yet another mesh. It runs on 2.4GHz which, if not setup properly will interfere with and be interfered with your wifi, sonosnet, microwave, Bluetooth and many other protocols causing reliability and range issues.
Now back to the range, the vera’s antenna is quite weak… even more so if your vera has it’s 2.4Ghz wifi on using overlapping channels.

You will have to build a pretty descent mesh in your house to make it work.

The vera implementation currently only supports HA1.2 stack and is partial. It is painful to setup but it works. No LL protocol devices will work, meaning no tradfi or hue which use this lighting control protocol.

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Interesting. Good to know. I guess then it would be best to avoid Zigbee. I’ve heard z-wave protocol has opened up recently. Hopefully that will allow more innovation and competition to make things cheaper.

I doubt that it will become cheaper as the devices still need to pass Z-Wave Certification.
This to me is the major stumbling block for Z-Wave.

My post was intended to dissuade you from using zigbee. I am using it and quite successfully so. I just wanted to provide information so that people step into with their eyes open. Almost none of my zigbee devices are officially supported. I see official support as overrated. Instead, knowing how to build a solid mesh and a full stack HA stack support with easier device configuration is much more important (just like it is for zwave).

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