DYI Zigbee

I want to water the lawn during the night, sure there are plenty of existing systems that cost like $20 that will do it for me but what is the fun in that ? No instead let's see if I can spent $100 to be able control a solenoid valve using my home server.

Hardware requirements

• A zigbee switch that will power the valve when I want water to flow.
• A Zigbee adapter for the server.

Installation

First let's get a modern version of Python.

~$ git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git

~# apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev liblzma-dev

~/pyenv$ src/configure && make -C src

~$ echo 'export PATH="/home/${USER}/.local/bin:/home/${USER}/.pyenv/shims:${PATH}"' > ~/.bashrc

~$ mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

~$ ln -s /home/${USER}/pyenv/bin/pyenv /home/${USER}/.local/bin/pyenv

~$ source ~/.bashrc

~$ pyenv install 3.9.6

~$ pyenv global 3.9.6

~$ pip install pipenv        

Okay done with the snake, we need an mqtt broker and zigbee2mqtt

~# apt install mosquitto

        

~# echo "listener 1883 127.0.0.1" >> /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf

~# service mosquitto restart

~$ git clone https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt.git

~/zigbee2mqtt$ pipenv install nodeenv

~/zigbee2mqtt$ pipenv run nodeenv -p -n 16.4.2

        

~/zigbee2mqtt$ pipenv run npm ci        

We got everything, let's check which device the control is mapped to and configure zigbee2mqtt accordingly

~$ ls /dev/tty[AU]*
/dev/ttyUSB0

~/zigbee2mqtt$ sed -i 's/ttyACM0/ttyUSB0/g' data/configuration.yaml

~# chmod 666 /dev/ttyUSB0        

Let's start to test it out and give a friendly name to our device

~/zigbee2mqtt$ pipenv run npm start
 ...
        

Zigbee2MQTT:info  2021-07-11 02:53:10: Successfully configured '0x00124b0022ee4a71'

~/zigbee2mqtt$ sed -i 's/friendly_name: \'0x00124b0022ee4a71\'/friendly_name: \'lawn_valve\'/g' data/configuration.yaml        

Tell systemd to make sure zigbee2mqtt always runs by adding a service in /etc/systemd/system/zigbee2mqtt.service (make sure to replace your username)

[Unit]
Description=zigbee2mqtt
After=network.target


[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'pipenv run npm start'
WorkingDirectory=/home/dorian/zigbee2mqtt
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
User=dorian


[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target        

and enabling it

~# systemctl enable zigbee2mqtt.service

~# systemctl start zigbee2mqtt.service        

And voila ! Now we can send an mqtt message to start watering the lawn.