Nabu Casa and the Open Home Foundation just revealed the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2. It’s a USB adapter for adding Zigbee, Thread, or Matter devices to your Home Assistant setup, and you can order one starting today.
Home Assistant is a great way to turn a home server, router, or PC into a self-hosted smart home hub, but many devices can’t be controlled over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. For those use cases, you need another hub as an intermediary communication channel, or purpose-built hardware like the Home Assistant Green or ZBT-1 wireless adapter.
The new ZBT-2 adapter is the easiest way to add Zigbee, Thread, or Matter devices to Home Assistant. The previous ZBT-1 didn’t support Matter at all, and even though adoption of the Matter smart home standard has been slow, it’s great to have as an option. Production has also ended on that original model, but software support will continue “far into the future.”
The ZBT-2 is a free-standing antenna with a large base, which is “not only good at broadcasting to further away devices, but is also good at listening out for faint signals from far away devices.” Moving it away from your server with a USB extension cable might further improve reception. It’s also four times faster than the ZBT-1, using a new Silicon Labs MG24 system-on-a-chip.
Home Assistant explained in a blog post, “We also took the opportunity to quadruple the internal communications speed of the chip – taking the baud rate from 115,200 bps to 460,800 bps. In our testing, we saw consistent improvements in device responsiveness. Don’t expect your devices to turn on four times faster, but you’ll feel the difference when turning on several devices simultaneously.”
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Plus, improvements to automation, media controls, and more.
Right now, the adapter supports Zigbee 3.0 and Thread, but you can only use one protocol at a time. The team is also looking at Zigbee 4.0 support down the road. There’s no Z-Wave support, though—the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 can handle that, if you don’t have another compatible adapter or hub.
This is a great option for adding more devices to your Home Assistant setup, especially with more lights, thermostats, smart locks, and other hardware adopting Thread and Matter. Just like the previous adapter, the hardware is fully open with an unlocked bootloader.
You can buy the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 starting today, at an MSRP of $49 and €45. Each purchase also helps fund Home Assistant development.
Source: Home Assistant Blog