It’s like Bluetooth but for smart home devices.
If you have Philips Hue devices they support it out of the box and are ridiculously easy to use with Home Assistant. A bunch of others do too
I’d recommend you use the Home Assistant OS and also set up Zigbee2MQTT.
As an alternative to your smart switches, you can use the Hue wall switch modules, which you can wire to any wall-mountable switch/button and link to anything.
I do have a Hue system also but do you have to bypass the hub?
The answer is you throw out the hub, and *pair it as like you would with the hub* by putting it into setup mode
Then you allow devices to join on your coordinator and it just works, no hacky workarounds required
Since I am a nerd I have my Home Assistant pi shoved in a server rack.
The Zigbee coordinator is in another place with another Pi, that has a USB dongle connected and it connects to an MQTT server on the HA pi
I’m about to go on a trip so I’ll do some research and think about it when I get back. Thanks! 🙏
