“a great piece of kit so easy to install
just plug it in and it has everything for itself even set up your old zigbee devices
i've set this one up to run as as zigbee
i'm thinking of buying a second device to run as thread”
“Half baked product, (too) early released, and given the set expectations with regards to improvements over the zbt-1, one can argue that the product fails to deliver on advertised features.
A few concrete problems(on HA green)
1. it cannot be installed directly, so if you don't have zigbee integration installed, you have to do that first, and then the antenna will be available for selection with zigbee integration, contrary to the instructions. It probably works smoothly if you already have zigbee integration installed, vut that's a big UX failure there. You can se the device though on the hardware list, at least that to confirm it's working fine. I guess it is for geeks, so maybe that's fine, but it shouldn't be fine to release a half baked product.
2. it won't be able to see any zigbee devices with the out of the box firmware, and there is no indication that is the problem. Firmware upgrade cannot be performed whilst connected to the HA green, but it needs connecting to a usb port on a machine (worked fine with Mac), the n follow the online steps to upgrade firmware. This is ridiculous for an upgrade procedure that is absolutely necessary to get the device to actually become useful. What if you don't have a machine, and you only have the HA green/something like that.
Other than that, it works good once troubleshooting done. The delivery was swift. Pleased with PiHut. Hopefully my review will help others to get the zbt-2 working as quick as possible.”
“Impressive! Upgraded from a Conbee 2. The ZBT-2 build quality is exceptional and Zigbee signal strength is great. No issues at all getting working in Zigbee2MQTT.”
“Really surprised nobody has mentioned this yet. The latest Zigbee firmware isn't stable. It seems to do different things for different people. For me it crashed my network zigbee network, and I had to start again. The solution? Downgrade to previous version. This happened just after xmas - and there's still no update for it. The original firmware wasn't stable either. For what's not a budget option, I'm suprised that we're seeing these issues, and that they're not being resolved quicker. When it does work - its great - its the firmware delivery (speed) + testing seems to be the issue.”
“It's a great bit of kit. Packaging etc all top notch stuff. Getting it to work with HA installed inside Docker was definately not plug and play but ChatGPT will get you there after a few iterations.
I'm using mine for Thread / Matter and hope that some day it will also be able to run zigbee in parrallel.”
