SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway, Universal Zigbee USB Gateway with Antenna for Home Assistant, Open HAB etc, Wireless Zigbee 3.0 USB Adapter(1 Pack)

Would I upgrade to this if I had to do it again -Yes. My previous install a ConBee II running on HA Blue (and before that an old NUC). Now why did I choose to upgrade? Well, I didn’t originally plan to - the ConBee II was working well (had nothing to compare too). Then not long ago during a routine update to HA something just broke. My regular backups didn’t help and the ConBee II decided to just refuse to communicate. So I ordered the Sonoff as a replacement. But by the time it arrived I had managed to get the ConBee II working. I was going to send this back. But, I had to open the box didn’t I?! The Sonoff is in a aluminum case and feels so nice, and the external antenna had me wondering :) so of course I had to try it out. I went in to HA and removed the 20+ devices I had connected through the ConBee II. Yeah - I was committed:) I used ZHA instead of zigbee2mqtt - why - because it was just quicker to test. So one connected (obviously ZHA just picked it up instantly). I thought let’s see how well this picks up my six halo zigbee recessed lighting. Damn. It detected them a lot faster than the ConBee II. I was a little shocked. I then went on to create a group to see how well it’d control the lights - and damn again. The thing was way more smooth and responsive than the previous setup. Note: I installed this is the same spot I had the ConBee II. I’m not saying the ConBee II sucked. Not at all, it did it’s job and I would have been as happy as I was. But after using the Sonoff - definitely glad to have upgraded. Plus it was an excuse to muck around with nerdy stuff for an afternoon. Some other things - yes I had to add all my zigbee devices again - but that really isn’t as big of a pain if you do it in stages. Secondly a lot of my automations are in Node Red and use IEEE which doesn’t change so a majority of those still worked. Overall - I wasn’t planning to upgrade, but happy I did. Now I just have to explain to the wife why it was a good idea - and that might not be as easy :)

I set up a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant (under Docker) and this is my Zigbee interface. So far I am only using Sonoff sensors and AC switched sockets on Zigbee and it is working flawlessly. I am using a USB hub (at the end of a 12 cable), so the antenna is a comfortable distance from the Pi to avoid any interference. There are fins on the Sonoff Zigbee dongle, which I assumed were there for thermal dissipation, but the unit does not heat up noticeably. (The USB hub, however, does get quite warm.) I am happy with this Zigbee interface and I recommend it to anyone looking to build out a Zigbee network.

So I was using another Zigbee controller for my zigbee network, it was laggy, rarely passed through to the Home Assistant server without messing with it for about 5 minutes. Then I purchased this one. Passthrough is flawless every time the machine boots, the control is much faster than my previous and I would recommend this to anyone getting into home automation.

Had an old Zigbee 1.2 adapter that would drop my Aqara sensors after a couple hours. This adapter worked out of the box and fixed the drop outs. Running Hassio on a RPI4.

I followed every video trying to set this up with home assistant I have a home assistant rig thats running fine but adding this zigbee to it prove to be impossible after about 10 hours of working on it I give up. Unfortunately Im 4 days past the return period and I dont have the box anymore. Disappointed how difficult this is to setup.

EDIT: solved pairing problem by using a USB extension cable to get the Dongles antenna 3 feet away from my WiFi router and other WiFi devices. Now it works fine, pairing with all my Zigbee devices. I know Zigbee uses the same 2.4 GHz spectrum as WiFi but I didnt expect it to be so sensitive to interference. Thank you to Smart Home Junkie for solving the problem. Original Review: I tried to pair all kinds of different devices with this controller and nothing would appear. So I found that you could flash updated firmware that fixes pairing issues and tried that but the flashing software could not find the device on any of my USB ports and kept crashing. So thats it, after 2 days of trying to get this to work, I am returning it for a refund.

I am using this stick on a Windows 11 mini-computer running a Home Assistant VM setup. It works flawlessly. It picks up devices pretty far away from the stick as long as you have it plugged into a USB extension cable to reduce interference from the computer. Home Assistant immediately picked up the stick and configured it with no problems. Im very happy with this purchase.

Works as expected. Should make it easier to swap wifi channels especially since the 2.4Ghz band doesnt have many center frequencies to choose from. Could easily interfere with wifi devices.

I bought this to integrate ZigBee devices into my Home Assistant instance. Works perfectly on Debian 10 with HA running in docker. Recommend grabbing a USB extension cable to be able to set the dongle in an optimal spot and as far from your router/any Bluetooth devices as possible.

This was my first Zigbee device and, with that, there was a bit of learning and troubleshooting to be done. It took a bit to get everything working as expected, but I’m certain that was all from my lack of experience. Below I’ve hit on the process I went through and some of my hiccups. A couple of notes about my setup, I’m using Home Assistant with the Mosquitto Broker and Zigbee2mqtt add-ons. You should also be able to use ZHA, but that’s not the route I went. I started off by flashing updated firmware (this is entirely optional). Following a video by Mark Watt Tech, I was able to update the firmware no problem. After flashing, I plugged the Sonoff dongle into my raspberry pi that’s running HA, started Mosquitto, and then started Zigbee2mqtt. Mosquitto started just fine, but Zigbee2mqtt was complaining about not being able to start Herdsman. After a bit of digging and some testing, I figured out that it was a matter of interference. My initial solution was removing the antenna for the dongle. This worked, but isn’t ideal as it reduces the potential signal strength and range. I was able to reinstall the antenna by picking up a USB extension cable, and moving the dongle further away from from the pi and the network hardware in the area. Since the addition of the USB extension cable, this has worked great and has enabled several new automations into my smart home.