Sonoff Zigbee USB Dongle Plus-ZBDongle-E 3.0 External Antenna Interface SMA Gateway Universal, Pre-Installed with Zigbee Firmware Based on EZNet 6.10.3 Coordinated Home Assistant or Zigbee2MQTT

Over the past year, I've bought 3 for various installations in different places. I used one each with each of Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5. I use them with Home Assistant.They work great.Hint: connect them to a Raspberry Pi by way of a USB extender cable about a meter long to keep the dongle away from all the interference that the Pi puts out.

I bought this and plugged it into a raspberry pi 5. I use it along with HA. I currently have 8 zigbee devices connected and haven't had an issue yet. It was easy to setup and has a pretty good signal strength.

I have these installed on my Home Assistant systems to provide Zigbee connectivity. This interface was auto detected and easy to configure. I have been happy with the range and it is really fire and forget. There are a surprising number of things that use Zigbee and I use it with ZWave, Insteon and Matter at the same time. For a fairly low price you open up a lot of options for connectivity.

I replaced my old 2-in-1 (zwave + zigbee) with this one and another zwave dongle. This has a much better range coverage and I don't need to use zigbee smart plugs as relay server and connections are more stable.

Flashed the latest drivers to it and plugged it into my usb hub and it worked instantly with HA.

I wanted to use this with Home Assistant. I have the -E version with the MG21 chipset. I wanted to update the firmware to either OpenThread or the multiprotocol ZB/OT firmware. This turned into an unexpected challenge.It came with firmware so old that none of the current flashing tools would get it into flashing mode. I had to open it to use the override buttons. You have to push and hold the Boot button while plugging it in, or hold Boot while pressing Reset momentarily.Once you actually get it into flashing mode, you can use the usual tools. I used the usual darkxst web flasher. It reported old 6.x EZSP firmware while the current version is 7.x. It was easy to either update to the current EZSP firmware, or switch to either Multiprotocol or OpenThread at this point. There were no surprises.Performance wise, it has been reliable and the external antenna is quite a step up over the usual dongles or the Home Assistant Yellow that I was using it with.There is a QR code in the tiny manual in the box that has unlisted documentation links for reflashing. It's not very clear but provided the clues for me to get it to work.Do be careful to not confuse this with the -P version with a different chipset. The -E version is what you want with Home Assistant.Overall, I recommend it still in 2024, but be prepared for some hassle with flashing.

Used and works perfectly on Home Assistant.

No complaints, has worked very well in my new home. I’m running this on a n100 mini pc with proxmox and HA with no complaints