I’m excited – as you’ll see below I have left my new SMLight SLZB-06 ETHERNET Zigbee coordinator in the UK – working well (but not at all stressed) and I have one coming to Spain this coming week.That leaves the question – what to do with my Sonoff-P and Sonoff-E USB Zigbee dongles – see the next post..I’ve now been using various serial adaptors (Sonoff and others) for Zigbee2MQTT on my Raspberry PIs (4 then 5) for a long time – not perfect but they work – and only this month found myself in our second home (overseas in the UK) with a conundrum – I have no central home controller here but access my RPi in Spain using Tailscale VPN.
Here in the UK I have a couple of Sonoff Zigbee temperature sensors and have been using an NSPanel Pro here to access them locally and remotely.Aside from being a little over-the-top to use the NSPanel Pro for a pair of sensors, I’ve been looking to add more sensors and light controls – but the idea of being bound to only Sonoff for Zigbee doesn’t appeal as I also regularly use Aqara and other sensors, not supported by NSPanel Pro.Coincidentally I was reading about the SMLight SLZB-06 Ethernet Zigbee coordinators readily available from AliExpress..
and I wondered if it would be possible to use one of these instead of the NSPanel Pro.That immediately started me thinking of another Raspberry Pi and Zigbee dongle + PSU etc., which kind of defeated the point.And then it hit me, could I possible use my RPI in Spain, which, thanks to Docker, can easily support a second instance of Zigbee2MQTT – but if I went down the SLZB-06 route, would it be possible to connect said SLZB-06 to the remote RPi5? I looked at the base model as I don’t have POE and hence could use USB for power.
As it turns out, a pal of mine managed to get one of these units for me and so 2 days later I hooked the unit into my UK network.After updating to the latest firmware, I spun up a second instance of Zigbee2MQTT over in Spain thanks again to Tailscale and a Mobaxterm SSH session.I made this second instance a clone of the first but then went into the configuration file and changed the serial dongle reference to the IP address of my new Ethernet device.
We also changed the port for accessing the Ziggbee2MQTT web interface from default 9099 to 9199.Within a matter of minutes we had the new device working – leaving only the pairing of my 2 sensors.As usual thanks to my pal Antonio in Italy for his remote help in setting this up.
I have to say I was skeptical at first but here I am in the UK, armed with only the SLZB-06 locally talking to my sensors and of course as it is talking to Zigbee2MQTT back in Spain, it will be no problem to add in, say, some Aqara Zigbee sensors next time I’m here.Already I can see the range is better than my serial dongle back home – just as well, as I have at this time no other mains Zigbee devices here in the UK to act as routers/extenders.Unlike the serial dongles which had to be on USB extenders to stop the dongle interacting with the RPi WiFi, no such issue with the SLZB-06 which is conveniently placed on a wall – even easier with the POE version but I have no POE here so I used the handy USB output on my 4G router.
On returning to Spain I’m now waiting for another SLZB-06 for the Spanish end – good gadget and VERY easy to use.