I now have two dongles – both Sonoff ZBDongle E devices – connected to the Raspberry Pi which runs my Home Assistant instance. One is for Zigbee, and the other one is for Thread.
Last January, I wrote about how I was using both Zigbee and Thread on the same dongle. This uses ‘multi-protocol’ mode, and requires a Home Assistant addon which can differentiate between Zigbee and Thread data packets. However, this is no longer recommended:
During the further development and testing of the multiprotocol firmware, we have concluded that while Silicon Labs’ multiprotocol works, it comes with technical limitations. These limitations mean users will not have the best experience compared to using dedicated Zigbee and Thread radios. That is why we do not recommend using this firmware, and it will remain an experimental feature of Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect. If you currently have the multiprotocol firmware installed but don’t actively use it to connect to Thread devices, we recommend that you disable multiprotocol.
For the time being, I have been operating a single ZBDongle E just with Zigbee firmware. However, now that I have some Thread devices, I decided to buy a second dongle and flash that with Thread firmware, using this web flasher.
Now, my Thread smart plugs can be reached by Home Assistant without its own Thread dongle – I have a Google Nest Wi-Fi system which also acts as Thread Border Routers. Therefore, having a Thread dongle isn’t necessary – Home Assistant can see and interact with the devices using Google Nest Wi-Fi. But having a dedicated Thread dongle for Home Assistant does offer some advantages:
- Thread is a mesh network, so adding another Thread device extends the mesh and should improve resilience.
- It gives Home Assistant direct access to the Thread network.
- It enables another Thread Border Router, offering an additional exit node.
- The Home Assistant Thread Border Router addon includes a web interface, allowing you to view your network’s topology and get a visual representation of how the devices connect to each other.
You may also notice that I’ve labelled the two dongles so that I know which one is which, using my trusty Bluetooth label printer.
If you’re looking to buy your own Sonoff ZBDongle E, you can, of course, buy one from Amazon (sponsored link), but (whispers: they’re cheaper on AliExpress).
Just a note: I was unable to flash any updated firmware on the newer dongle that I bought this month, using the Web flasher, so that’s now the Zigbee dongle. Apparently it may be an issue with the Windows drivers, as I was able to use Home Assistant’s Silabs Firmware Flasher addon to update it instead. If you specify this custom URL in the addon settings, it’ll use the latest (as of November 2024) Zigbee firmware. It’s also worth noting that, if you use Zigbee2MQTT, once you’re running the latest Zigbee firmware, you’ll need to tell Zigbee2MQTT to use the new ’ember’ driver rather than ‘ezsp’.
The older dongle seemed to happy to accept different firmware using the web flasher, having done so in the past. So, that’s the one with the Thread firmware.
