Our buddy Paul Taylor is back with Part 2 of his series teaching us about Raspbee/Conbee for home automation!
Welcome to the second part of a series on the Phoscon ZigBee Gateway.
The first part introducing the hardware is available HERE.
Quickly to recap though the ConBee is the USB version and the RaspBee is the Raspberry Pi HAT
Notes Before Beginning:
• If you are using the RaspBee and are starting from scratch I highly recommend skipping all this and downloading the preconfigured Raspbian image from: https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee/sdcard
• I will only be covering the installation on Raspbian.
• The Windows installation for the ConBee is available on the product’s website: – https://phoscon.de/en/conbee/install#windows10
• deCONZ requires a full Raspbian installation with the X-windows GUI not the lite version
• There is a “Dockerized” version of deCONZ available at https://github.com/marthoc/docker-deconz but I have never used it
Hardware Installation
RaspBee
1. Please make sure that the Pi is switched off.
2. Connect the RaspBee to the Pi 40 pin header. – (Pin 1 of RaspBee (square marker) must be connected to Pin 2 of RPi header P1 at the board edge.)
3. Open the Pi config tool – (sudo raspi-config)
4. Select “Interfacing Options”
5. Select “Serial”
6. “Would you like a login shell to be accessible over serial?” → <No>
7. “Would you like the serial port hardware to be enabled?” →<Yes>
8. Exit the config tool and reboot the Pi – (sudo shutdown -r now)
ConBee
1. Plug it into a free USB port 🙂
deCONZ Installation
1. From a terminal window
2. Download the deCONZ package – (wget http://www.dresden-elektronik.de/rpi/deconz/deconz-latest.deb)
3. Run the installation – (sudo dpkg -i deconz-latest.deb)
4. Install any missing dependencies – (sudo apt update) and then (sudo apt install –f)
5. If not already running start the desktop environment – (startx)
6. Enable deCONZ systemd GUI service – (sudo systemctl enable deconz-gui)
7. The deCONZ X GUI is available at Menu > Programming > deCONZ – (Truthfully I’ve never used it, the WebApp has been all I’ve ever needed to add devices. It may be necessary to use some sensor based internal automations)
8. If you don’t know the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. Go to http://phoscon.de/app – You will see an image similar to the one below:
9. Click the link to open the WebApp
10. The WebApp will either ask you to name the gateway and choose a password or login – (If it asks to login the username/password is delight/delight)
In the next section we will move on to device pairing and connecting devices in the Phoscon WebApp
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