Home Manager

The RaspBee Il module turns your Raspberry Pi into a smart control center for Zigbee devices

- Erik Bärwaldt

New technologies and new providers are constantly expanding the range of potential smart home applications. Solutions from various manufacturers are often mutually incompatible, which means customers cannot leverage the full potential of home automation services.

But there is another approach. Zigbee is a protocol for low-power wireless communication based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The Zigbee protocol is often used for home automation devices. Dresden elektronik [1] has been working on light control systems based on the Zigbee protocol for some 10 years and now offers numerous vendor-agnostic systems for the smart home. The company also distributes the RaspBee module for home automation with a Raspberry Pi. A RaspBee device with the accompanying software can help you reap the benefits of the smart home without expensive gateways and cloud connections.

The RaspBee module, which has already reached its second generation, is a piece of hardware attached on top of a Raspberry Pi (called a HAT) that helps users convert the system into a control center for smart home devices such as lights, alarms, or smart sockets and switches. The RaspBee II module [2] supports devices from various manufacturers with home automation solutions based on the Zigbee protocol. The underlying technology is a framework for wireless networks that are especially suitable for home automation due to their low data volume and low energy requirements.

The modular Zigbee protocol supports extensions, and some manufacturers try to boost customer loyalty by adding new functions that lead to incompatibility with devices by other providers, thus preventing users from switching. The Zigbee II module takes this into account by having the developers test components from a wide range of vendors and add them to continually updated compatibility lists [3].