Help with ZigBee/ZWave adapter

WebThings
1

Hello all! I just got Things setup and I’m looking to test it out in my house. I have Things running successfully on a Pi. In my house I have a bunch of ZigBee and a few ZWave devices, so naturally I went for an adapter. I got this one first:

My thinking was that one dongle would support both standards, so I could combine everything under Things for control. I plugged the adapter in, but I was unable to get it to detect any devices. In particular I couldn’t get ZigBee to work for my Hue lights. Upon further digging I realized that this adapter wasn’t mentioned in the Wiki as one that’s supported, so I got this one:

I added the “adapter” for it and tried to find some ZigBee stuff, but it didn’t work out of the box. Understanding that Things is really early and that I’d likely have to do some command line stuff I went digging and found this GitHub page for the conbee adapter I have: GitHub - tomasy/zigbee-conbee-adapter: Adapter for Mozila IoT. Supports Zigbee by using ConBee USB stick

I tried my best to follow the instructions, but they’re either incomplete, or more likely I don’t understand the context.

I assume I’m going to have to do more than just plug this stick into the Pi. It looks like I need an API key and such, but before that do I need to have some kind of service running on the Pi to support the conbee stick?

The instructions aren’t even clear about where I’m supposed to get this key, from Chrome on the Pi, or on my PC?

I was about to flash stock Raspbian and try the Linux utility ConBee supplies (it’s GUI only it looks like) and then try and load Things to see if I could get it to work… Before I go down that rabbit hole I figured I’d ask here.

I’m not a developer, but I’m reasonably comfortable with doing basics on a Pi. Perhaps I’ve missed something super obvious here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

The ConBee is now supported by the official zigbee-adapter. The zigbee-conbee-adapter is a third party adapter which speaks to the DeConz REST API, which needs to be running separately wherever the dongle is plugged in. You’d be better off running the official Zigbee adapter, because all you have to do is plug the stick in and you’re good to go.

3

Ahhh, that’s very helpful! It worked perfectly. Maybe that ConBee adapter should get removed (or at least noted) so that others don’t fall into the same trap I did!

I was able to connect a motion sensor, now if only I could connect my Hues!

4

The Hue bulbs should work. They need to be factory reset which requires an external dimmer device. See this wiki page: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/HOWTO:-Factory-reset-a-Hue-bulb

Note: once the Hue bulbs are paired with the ConBee they will no longer be controllable through the Hue Hub, unless you factory reset them again and pair them with the Hue Hub.

There is also a Hue Hub adapter, although I don’t have any experience using it.