Sonoff has released their new version of their Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, the ZBDongle-E. In this video, I’ll show you how to set it up with Zigbee2MQTT in Home Assistant and share some tips to help you get the most out of the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E stick. Let’s dive into this!

⭐ Buy the NEW Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E with a 15% discount here

⭐ Use code JUNKIE15 at checkout to get a discount!

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Ed

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Introduction

The new version of the popular Sonoff Zigbee Stick differs from the previous Dongle-P version. You can see these differences on this site here: https://itead.cc/product/zigbee-3-0-usb-dongle/ref/3/#d.

You can recognize the stick by the text ZBDongle-E on the box. In addition, this stick is about 5.1 cm long, which is a bit shorter than the ZBDongle-P. This tutorial shows you how to install both Sonoff Zigbee sticks with Zigbee2MQTT in Home Assistant.

Despite the fact that this stick is currently still classified as experimental on the Zigbee2MQTT site, I still took the plunge. I’ve tested this stick extensively over the past few days and even transferred my entire house to the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E. For this, I linked the stick to Zigbee2MQTT in Home Assistant. I’ll show you how you can do that first. At the end of the video, I share my experiences and give tips to make this stick work as good as possible.

Add a new User

To get this stick working in Home Assistant you need to do the following:

We will first create a user that will be used by the Mosquitto MQTT addon.

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to People
3. Click on Add Person
4. Name the person: MQTT-user
5. Click on Allow person to log in
6. Enter a password
7. Enter the password again
8. Click on Can only log in from the local network
9. Click Create

Find out what our stick is called in the system

Now we’re going to find out what our Sonoff Zigbee stick is called in our system

1. Go back to Settings
2. Go to System
3. Go to Hardware
4. Click on the three dots at the top right
5. Click on All Hardware
6. Now search for your Sonoff stick in the list and click on the arrow next to it to open it.
7. At DEVLINKS, select the value that starts with /dev/serial/by-id… and copy it to your clipboard.

Install the Mosquitto MQTT Broker

Now we are going to install the Mosquitto MQTT add-on. This ensures that Zigbee2MQTT can send the values ​​of your Zigbee devices using the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E to Home Assistant and vice versa.

1. Go back to Settings
2. Go to Add-ons
3. Click Add-On Store
4. Search for MQTT and click on Mosquitto broker
5. Click on install now
6. After the installation is complete, you can click on Watchdog
7. Then click on start
8. Now go back to Settings
9. Go to Devices & Services
10. Click Configure in the MQTT card.
    If you don’t see the MQTT card, you can first look it up at search integrations. Sometimes it is necessary to refresh your browser’s cache before you can see this MQTT card.
11. Click submit now
12. And click finish!

Super! The Mosquitto MQTT broker is now installed. Now we are going to install Zigbee2MQTT.

Install Zigbee2MQTT in Home Assistant

1. Go to settings
2. Go to Add-ons
3. Go to the add-on store
4. We now need to add a custom repository to install Zigbee2MQTT.
5. Click on the three dots at the top right
6. Click on Repositories
7. Now enter the following repository URL: https://github.com/zigbee2mqtt/hassio-zigbee2mqtt
8. Click on Add
9. Click Close
10. Refresh your browser now.

You should now see two Zigbee2MQTT add-ons in the list: The production version and the development or Edge version.

11. Click on the Zigbee2MQTT card
12. Click Install
13. Zigbee2MQTT is now installed
14. Click on Watchdog and Show in Sidebar after the installation is complete
15. Now we need to configure Zigbee2MQTT.
16. Go to Configuration
17. Put the following data in the mqtt field:
18. The server is mqtt://core-mosquitto:1883
19. The user is the user we created earlier: mqtt-user
20. And the password is the password you entered for that user
21. Then enter the following information in the serial field:
22. The port is the value of the stick you put on your clipboard, so you can paste it with ctrl-v
23. If you have the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E, then please add adapter: ezsp. You don’t really have to do that if you have the older Zigbee Dongle-P.
24. Now click on Save
25. Now go to the Info tab and click start!

In the log tab, you can see if the startup is going well.

If you get error messages in the log, it could be due to several things. You can go to this site to check exactly what the problem on your system is.

If everything went well, you can now open Zigbee2MQTT.

How to pair devices in Zigbee2MQTT

1. In the left menu, go to Zigbee2MQTT
2. We are now going to pair some devices.
3. Click on Permit join (All)
4. Now put your device into pairing mode. In my case, that is an IKEA lightbulb and an Aqara Motion Sensor.
5. You will see that Zigbee2MQTT will discover and configure the devices. This can take a while and sometimes it doesn’t work in one go. You might have to re-pair a device several times before it is recognized.
6. If everything went well, you will see your devices in the overview with a picture of Zigbee2MQTT with a photo of each device.
7. If you click on the device, under Exposes you see which sensors have been detected by Zigbee2MQTT. You can also control the device here.
8. Now first change the name of the devices so that we can easily recognize them in Home Assistant.
9. Click on the blue icon next to the device
10. Give the device a Friendly name.
11. Click Update Home Assistant entity ID
12. Then click on Rename device
13. Do this for all devices in the list

The devices now work in Zigbee2MQTT using the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E. Now we will search the devices in Home Assistant to see if they work there.

Check paired devices in Home Assistant

1. Go back to Settings
2. Click on Devices & Services
3. Click on the Devices tab
4. Find the devices in the list
5. My Aqara Motion Sensor and Ikea light bulb are listed, so Zigbee2MQTT was able to successfully connect to the Mosquitto MQTT add-on.
6. When I open the Ikea lightbulb, you see that I can control it in Home Assistant.
7. When I open the Aqara motion sensor, you see that the values ​​of the sensors are passed on neatly.

So we managed to install Zigbee2MQTT and get it working in Home Assistant with the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E!

If you want to buy the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E, you can click on the link in the description. There is also a discount code with which you get a discount of 15% on your purchase. I get a small affiliate fee for your purchase, without it costing you extra money and you support me a bit for making this video. The discount code is only available for a limited time, so order it quickly.

Buy the NEW Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E with a 15% discount here.

The discount code is: JUNKIE15

Then I have some tips with which you can get the Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E working with Zigbee2MQTT as well as possible in your home. I spent about a day re-pairing all my devices in the house and I discovered the following best practices.

Tip 1

First of all, disable the default Zigbee integration ZHA in Home Assistant! You cannot run ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT at the same time using the same stick!

Tip 2

Second, use a USB-extension cable between your Zigbee stick and your Home Assistant server.

Buy a good USB extension cable here.

Tip 3

Third, first pair all your powered devices such as your lamps and then your battery-powered devices.

Tip 4

Normally I pair all my devices at the location where I’m going to use them, but that turned out to be very difficult with this stick. Somehow this stick struggled to quickly set up the Zigbee mesh network. As a result, Zigbee2MQTT was able to find the devices, but interviewing the devices did not always go well. In the end, I paired all my devices close to the stick and got everything paired.

Tip 5

If a device cannot be paired properly the first time, try a few more times. Usually, it goes well the second or third time.

Pro-Tip!

And then the pro tip: Use a smart plug and this Home Assistant script to pair your IKEA lightbulbs. This script ensures that the lamps are switched on and off at the correct time interval so that they always immediately enter pairing mode. Ikea lamps are very sensitive to the correct interval to put them in pairing mode and this script saves you a lot of time and frustration. You can download the code here.

Thanks, Frenck from Home Assistant for this script!

I hope this video helped you and I want to thank everyone who has supported me so far in making these videos and tutorials. I could never have done this without you. Thank you! If you also want to support me, see how you can do that in the description of this video. With that, you make it possible that I can continue to make these videos for you.

Oh, don’t forget to give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel, and hit the notification bell.

I will see you soon!

Bye bye!

⭐ Buy the NEW Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E with a 15% discount here

⭐ Use code JUNKIE15 at checkout to get a discount!