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At this weekend I finally established another network in my home — a ZigBee network. A looong time ago (in 2010 year) I touched the ZigBee networking in my university (ITMO, previously IFMO, in Saint-Petersburg) — these times it was a new technology, not used widely. And as a student I have some fun time playing with ZigBee main router, supplemental router and end-devices. You can view old photos and screenshots of old software on a my extremely old blog: http://h0rr0rr-drag0n.blogspot.com/2010/04/cc2530zdk.html (and read a blogpost, if you understand Russian).It is kindly fascinating, that now, after 15 years, I can just buy some ZigBee-powered devices from AliExpress (using Black Friday discounts) and connect them to the network inside my house right in the way I did it in the university 15 years ago!Sadly, although I bought native supported main router device, based on the EFR32MG2 with some software from Ember (EZSP v8) inside, the OpenHAB doesn't support this device natively — it supports it, but since my server is running NetBSD, I got problems with some bundled with OpenHAB things. Looks like some native libraries (rxtx-java) don't have bundled NetBSD versions. And the same library in the repository built for Java 8, not for Java 17.So, I decided to use Zigbee2MQTT, not to build the necessary Java library myself. It was kinda scary — use program, which connects my ZigBee network via ZigBee USB-dongle to the MQTT server — which is written on JavaScript . Not on the C (as I can totally understand, for a such low-level program, operating with embedded devices) or at least on the C++/Perl/Python/whatever. But, looks like it works good enough, if I don't try to pair the device in wrong mode (my window sensors has two modes to pair them with network: first "common" mode causes zigbee2mqtt to silently crash and the second "compatible" mode works without problems).And I could understand now, why people has so much problems with smart home security. Installed MQTT server mosquitto — it allows unauthenticated connections by default. Installed zigbee2mqtt — it allow connections to frontend without any password by default At least these two services don't each much memory: 1.2 Mb for Mosquitto and 75.6 Mb for ZigBee2MQTT.For now, my ZigBee sensors works pretty well and robust, like these devices from university 15 years ago #HomeAutomation #OpenHAB #ZigBee #HomeLab

Random git tip for small devices:git config core.bigFileThreshold 50mBy default git's "unpack" logic is quite memory intensive and if you need to "git pull" a large repo on something like an rpi zero you will probably end up OOMing. Set the threshold for "big files" to something reasonable (like 50 megs) and instead of reading the entire file into RAM and then writing it, it does a streaming copy and has a tiny in-memory I/O buffer instead. Yay.(optionally specify git config --global to apply to all repos)#homelab #homeautomation

Lil guide about OpenHAB4 installation into the NetBSD sandbox.https://eugene-andrienko.com/it/2025/11/07/install-openhab4-to-netbsd.html#NetBSD #OpenHAB #HomeAutomation