I've been playing with Homeassistant a fair bit of late and I've collected a bunch of interesting gadgets. Today I'd like to talk about / review the SLZB-06M.

So the first obvious question: what is a SLZB-06M?

It is a small, Ukrainian designed device that is a: "Zigbee 3.0 to Ethernet, USB, and WiFi Adapter" So, basically you connect it to your wired network, or via usb or via wifi and it gateways that to a Zigbee network. It's really just a esp32 with a shell and ethernet/wifi/bluetooth/zigbee, but all assembled for you and ready to go.

I'm not sure if my use case is typical for this device, but it worked out for me pretty nicely. I have a pumphouse that is down a hill and completely out of line-of-sight of the main house/my wifi. I used some network over power/powerline adapters to extend a segment of my wired network over the power lines that run from the house to it, and that worked great. But then I needed some way to gateway the zigbee devices I wanted to put there back to my homeassistant server.

The device came promptly and was nicely made. It has a pretty big antenna and everything is pretty well labeled. On powering it home assistant detected it no problem and added it. However, then I was a bit confused. I already have a usb zigbee adapter on my home assistant box and the integration was just showing things like the temp and firmware. I had to resort to actually reading the documentation! :)

Turns out the way the zigbee integration works is via zigbee2mqtt. You add the repo for that, install the add on and then configure a user. Then you configure the device via it's web interface on the network to match that. Then, the device shows up in a zigbee2mqtt pannel. Joining devices to it is a bit different from a normal wifi setup, you need to tell it to 'permit join', either anything, or specific devices. Then you press the pair button or whatever on the device and it joins right up. Note that devices can only be joined to one zigbee network, so you have to make sure you do not add them to other zigbee adapters you have. You can set a seperate queue for each one of these adapters, so you can have as many networks as you have coordinator devices for.

You can also have the SLZB-06M act as a bluetooth gateway. I may need to do that if I ever add any bluetooth devices down there.

The web interface lets you set various network config. You can set it as a zigbee coordinator or just a router in another network. You can enable/disable bluetooth, do firmware updates (but homeassistant will do these directly via the normal integration), adjust the leds on the device (off, or night mode, etc). It even gives you a sample zigbee2mqtt config to start with.

After that it's been working great. I now have a temp sensor and a smart plug (on a heater we keep down there to keep things from freezing when it gets really cold). I'm pondering adding a sensor for our water holding tank and possibly some flow meters for the pipes from the well and to the house from the holding tank.

Overall this is a great device and I recommend it if you have a use case for it.

Slava Ukraini!