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  1. Zigbee Adapter ConBee2
    1. Installation of deCONZ
    2. Using deCONZ

Zigbee Adapter ConBee2

The Conbee2 Adapter was developed by Phoscon in Germany. It’s a small usb device to connect to other zigbee devices. It is really powerful. Inside buildings, you can reach devices in a 30 m radius and outside buildings it can reach devices in a 200 m radius.

As soon as the ConBee2 adapter is plugged into the USB port, it is accessible under the path /dev/ttyACM0. The adapter can be used either with the software deCONZ from the manufacturer or with a bridge from Zigbee to MQTT (Zigbee2MQTT). Within these tools, Zigbee devices can be connected.

Because we are using Zigbee2MQTT instead of deCONZ, the installation of deCONZ is not necessary and only suitable for people who want to acquire additional knowledge about this software.

The tool itself is an application to configure, control and monitor Zigbee networks with the ConBee2 adapter. This tool cannot be used simultaneously with Zigbee2MQTT. If you want to try it out, stop the Zigbee2MQTT service and go through the following instructions.

Installation of deCONZ

  1. Set user USB access rights
sudo gpasswd -a $USER dialout
  1. Import Phoscon public key
 wget -O - http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz.pub.key | \
           sudo apt-key add -
  1. Configure the APT repository for deCONZ
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz \
            $(lsb_release -cs) main' > \
            /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deconz.list"
  1. Update APT package list
sudo apt update
  1. Install deCONZ
 sudo apt install deconz

Using deCONZ

The Phoscon app is hosted on the port 8080 on your Raspberry Pi. When you open it, you see your conbee2 device, select it. Now you must set up a password, after that it searches for zigbee devices. Feel free to play with it. Deconz also offers a UI on an X-Server. when you start deconz in a graphical environment you see another window. I don’t want to explain more, it’s not important for this project. But feel free to play with it. When you are ready with playing keep in mind, that you must stop deCONZ and start the zigbee2mqtt service again to make your zigbee devices working in this project.