I previously tried switching from the hue hub to conbee zha and found that experience subpar, I even updated the stick to the latest firmware which did help, but it still was not nearly as good hue hub. The main downsides were occasionally a button didnt work, but also the popcorn effect were you turn on a group of lights and they dont all turn on at once, like one or two may turn on a bit later etc. Groups of lights did not behave well and also the hue motion sensors did not work quite as well then with hue, I even tried the blueprint someone made for zha which helps, but still not as good. Ive heard the sonoff p dongle i think it was with zibgee2mqtt is a better experience, is that solid? any experiences with that? did buttons work consistently? do groups of lights behave well?
I use this combo with OpenHab instead of HA, but the relevant bits are all the same.
I find it pretty good, but have had these problems:
- Really poor Comms with devices: this turned out to be the placement of the dongle, it was too close to my PC case, and putting it on an extension resolved this completely.
- Rarely (once a quarter ish) the controller will fail to communicate with Zigbee2MQTT, causing the latter to crash. I’m not on the latest version of either and probably should update, but simply have the Zigbee2MQTT process (using a docker image) restart automatically and it’s not something I notice any more.
- Even more rarely (I’ve had it once) the dongle crashed to the point that I had to unplug it and plug it back in to restore service.
It’s by far more reliable than some of my questionable scripting choices 😊