At this weekend I finally established another network in my home — a ZigBee network.

[evgandr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

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