Since the end of last year, ITEAD has introduced several Zigbee Sonoff products such as Sonoff Basic R3 Zigbee, but so far customers had to rely on third-party hardware for the gateway, and they very recently launched a CC2531 Zigbee USB dongle to ease the task.
But now the company’s just-launched Sonoff ZBBridge WiFi to Zigbee gateway allows people to control compatible Zigbee devices using eWelink mobile app.
Sonoff ZBBridge specifications:
- Wireless Connectivity – 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 and Zigbee 3.0
- Power Input – 5V/1A
- Dimensions – 62 x 62 x 20 mm (PC V0)
- Weight – 35 grams
- Temperature Range – -10 to 40°C
The gateway is working with BASICZBR3 Smart Switch, S31 Lite zb Smart Plug, and the upcoming SNZB-01 Wireless Switch, SNZB-02 Temperature & humidity sensor, SNZB-03 motion sensor, and SNZB-04 wireless door/window sensor. It will also work with other smart devices certified by the ZigBee Alliance.
We don’t have many technical details from the product page, but the company recently sent a review sample to NotEnoughTECH and he opened the device…
We can see WiFi connectivity is handled by ESP8266 WiFI chip and Zigbee 3.0 by Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 Gecko Series 2 Cortex-M33 chip supporting multiprotocol, Zigbee, Thread, and Bluetooth mesh networking. So potentially, makers could potentially enable other protocols in the gateway. Tasmota got support for Zigbee recently, but the ESP8266 open-source firmware won’t be compatible with Sonoff ZBBridge because the implementation currently relies on TI CC2530 chip. I’ve mostly heard good things about Energy Micro (Now Silicon Labs) Gecko MCUs from developers, so it’s not impossible it gets added to Tasmota. [Update: See the discussion about that in comments]
The eWelink app has gone through a redesign recently, and the developers plan to offer free and paid plans meaning people with many devices or users may soon be asked to paid to use the app.
The free version won’t support IFTT, device passwords, nor give access to devices from PC or Apple Watch.
If you’d like to purchase Sonoff ZBBridge WiFi to Zigbee gateway, you can do so on their website for $16.90 plus shipping. A complete kit may soon be offered with various Zigbee sensors from the company once those become available.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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* not impossible it gets added to Tasmota (you wrote “not possible”). That is, it should be possible to get Tasmota and ESPurna running on it, but the question is when and if they can control the Zigbee radio module in a similar way Zigbee2Tasmota.
Also, both Tasmota and ESPurna, as well as a few other alternative firmware for ESP8266 based devices, already have support for the similar Sonoff RF Bridge 433 which looks to use very similar design.
Regarding Sonoff RF Bridge 433 you can checkout https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna/wiki/RFBRIDGE and https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna/wiki/Hardware-Itead-Sonoff-RF-Bridge—Direct-Hack
Sonoff RF Bridge and Sonoff Zigbee Bridge has nothing common.
Just the fact the use both ESP82xx for wifi.
Dont expect running Tasmota with using the onboard zigbee MCU.
There is NO Open Source Router Stack for this Chip Family
P.S. i am a contributor from Tasmota. The developer of Zigbee2Tasmota (s-hadinger) had already a look at this.
It does not have an open source stack but it has an open API via serial interface, similar to CC2530
https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/issues/8197
CC2530 does not either have open source stack but an open API via serial interface
Can you not compare this to the open source libraries bellows verses zigpy-cc?
https://github.com/zigpy/bellows
bellows uses serial interface for EZSP serial protocol and zigpy-cc uses Z-Stack ZNP serial protocol
https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-cc
As far as I know, no chip manufacture has an “Open Source Router Stack” for any Zigbee chip family?
Silicon Labs aren’t great supporters of open source based on my past experience working with them. They make really nice hardware and SDK’s, but require a lot of expensive proprietary hardware just to program the chips…
Exactly, Silicon Labs provide an SDK and several web documented APIs (a.k.a. open APIs), including a serial API, which open source projects can use to control the Zigbee stack that is running in their firmware. However, they just like other Zigbee chip manufacturer do not provide source code to that Zigbee stack or the full source code of their firmware as that contains proprietary code. Just like for Texas Instruments chips, Silicon Labs firmware is provided in the SDK as binary blobs with config files that let you modify the configuration. These facts should not stop Tosmota from being able… Read more »
Andreas, speaking about the Sonoff RF Bridge 433, I’m currently working on porting and updating the old source code from RFlink to ESP8266 and ESP32.
This is currently in early beta (receive only at that day) but we are a small team which moving fast 😉
The Sonoff RF Bridge 433 will be supported as wemos D1 mini or ESP32.
https://github.com/couin3/RFLink
I thought that RFLink did not have open source code? Have they released the original RFLink project under and open source license now?
Can this wifi gateway send/receive via an MQTT bridge?
Can I integrate Zigbee devices into a home controller software that supports MQTT (say, OpenHAB)
As far as we know today, not without a third-party firmware, see the other comments above.
This will not work with tasmota or ESPurna because the protocol to communicate with the Silicon Labs chipset is not the same as the one created for zigbee2mqtt. Hi, I’ve searched and read a lot these days about Zigbee so I give you some informations : Silicon Lbas use its own protocol called EmberZNet, a serial protocol documented here : https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/user-guides/ug100-ezsp-reference-guide.pdf There’s already a very good DIY gateway which use an ESP32 and a CC2538 (a lot better than cc2531 because there’s not a small limit of the number of devices). It ‘s called SLS gateway. I’ve made a small… Read more »
Yes someone with the needed skills would first need to make or port code which can communicate with the EZSP serial interface protocol. I understand that something similar to the bellows library for zigpy is needed in Tasmota: https://github.com/zigpy/bellows While it is true that the adapters listed as supported by bellows is “USB” they are actually just serial adapters with a USB interface. Once plugged in those adapters are presented as a USB port and you communicate with the chip using a serial protocol. zigpy (which is use by the ZHA integration component for Home Assistant) has many radio libraries… Read more »
This is a misunderstanding, I don’t say that Tasmota or ESPurna will never be compatible, I say that it will not work at that day. And I’m a gree to say that there’s a lot of chance that it comes from them in the near futur ! Btw I’m gonna create the issues for enhancement on the two github projects 😉 Thanks for zigpy, very interesting project, I didn’t know that it was the base of ZHA ! A quick way to make the this device compatible with Home Assistant could be to make a kind of bridge : all… Read more »
I don’t read Russian but sounds like that linked DEFARO SprutStick 2 / Pro (or is it Sprut Stick 2 / Pro), unfortunately, will be based an older first-generation EFR32MG1 (EFR32MG Series 1) instead of a newer second-generation EFR32MG2 (EFR32MG Series 2) chip, so while it might be faster and get stronger radio signal reception than other Zigbee sticks on the market it will probably not support Zigbee 3.0
Tasmota developers (well at least one) have now started hacking on the Sonoff ZBBridge Zigbee Bridge:
https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/issues/8583
It is very early days however I think that will be interesting to follow development on that sub-project.
There is also more discussion in https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee-herdsman/issues/168
ITead has now released a Zigbee 3.0 Dongle that is based on the same chip:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/03/18/itead-zigbee-3-0-usb-dongle-features-silicon-labs-efr32mg21-mcu/