Zigbee Home is an ESPHome-like firmware project for Zigbee devices

Zigbee Home firmware project aims to provide similar functionality to ESPHome open-source firmware, but for Zigbee devices based on Nordic Semi nRF52 wireless microcontrollers, and later on the newer nRF53 MCUs.

The firmware relies on Nordic Semi ZBOSS for Zigbee 3.0 stack and should eventually enable a range of Zigbee devices to be flashed with open-source firmware and facilitate integration with Home Assistant open-source home automation framework through ZHA integration, and support for Zigbee2MQTT is also being worked on.

Zigbee Home open source firmware nRF52

The project consists of the “base” firmware written in C and a CLI application written in Go language that will provide the necessary options to build and upload firmware based on the provided configuration. The zigbee.yml file is used to describe the target hardware in YAML. Here’s an example:


The command to flash the firmware to a board looks like this:


At this time the project is being developed with the official nRF52840 Dongle, and it is still in the early stages, so it’s not quite ready for end users. Note that it’s not the first project bringing nRF52 hardware to Home Assistant with the zigpy-zboss library aiming to do just that.

You’ll find Zigbee Home source code and basic instructions on GitHub.

Thanks to Hedda for the tip.

Share this:

Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress

ROCK 5 ITX RK3588 mini-ITX motherboard
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
The comment form collects your name, email and content to allow us keep track of the comments placed on the website. Please read and accept our website Terms and Privacy Policy to post a comment.
10 Comments
oldest
newest
Upgrade pi-top [3]
Upgrade pi-top [3]
10 months ago

I wonder if we’ll see this integrated into the InfiniTime firmware for the PineTime watch?

Anonymous
Anonymous
10 months ago

The PineTime is based on the nRF52832 which does not support Zigbee. Zigbee is only supported on the nRF52820, nRF52833, nRF52840, and nRF5340 MCUs.

Upgrade pi-top [3]
Upgrade pi-top [3]
10 months ago

Pity – from reading this line in the article…:
“for Zigbee devices based on Nordic Semi nRF52 wireless microcontrollers”
…I just figured that it would fall within that category and that it might be possible to convert its Bluetooth output to Zigbee or something.

Hedda
Hedda
10 months ago

Zigbee applications can probably at a later date be ported to Matter over Thread devices as used the same hardware and Matter devices being based on the Zigbee Cluster Library specification

Upgrade pi-top [3]
Upgrade pi-top [3]
10 months ago

Is Matter over Thread something to which Bluetooth can be converted?

Jon Smirl
10 months ago
Upgrade pi-top [3]
Upgrade pi-top [3]
10 months ago

I didn’t see the nrf52 series mentioned there? But if Matter over Thread already works on the nrf52832 then great, that’s promising!
Now to see whether JF002 et al. might be interested!

Mark Birss
Mark Birss
10 months ago

The instructions are somewhat lacking at this stage to actually build the firmware

Matt
Matt
10 months ago

I’ve been making zigbee devices with cc2530 boards which you can get for under $10 and ptvo.info firmware builder. You don’t have as much customization but it’s worked great for me and much cheaper than these nRF boards.

Hopefully the price of these boards come down as a modern chip and solution is needed.

Woody
Woody
9 months ago

It would be really nice to see this group try to find some crossover and include the ESP32-C6 (& upcoming H2). ESPHome supports them as wifi devices, but doesn’t even try to do anything with the Zigbee side of them. And based on the forums, it appears there’s little interest in dong so in the future.

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products