What is Home Assistant Sky Connect?
At the beginning of the Year Nabu Casa announced the Home Assistant Yellow and the Home Assistant SkyConnect. The Home Assistant SkyConnect is a USB Stick from Silicon Labs which supports Zigbee and with a Firmware update via Home Assistant as well Matter (the new Smart Home Standard).
The Product and all it’s details can be found here: Home Assistant SkyConnect – Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
Sky Connect USB Stick
I preordered the Sky Connect USB Stick already in September. The shipping from Nabu Casa to the resellers started in early December and since mid December most resellers started shipping the Sky Connect to the customers. So I received my Sky Connect in the middle of December. The package includes the Sky Connect USB Stick and an USB 2.0 extension Cable (due to general indifferences with USB3.0, small tipp for all Zigbee Sticks to use USB 2.0)
The Sky Connect is also available for partners in black colour instead of the blue colour you can see on my pictures.
To connect the Stick it is pretty simple. You just need to Plug it in and it should show up via the notifictions. Thats what the description says. Unlikly there are currently some problems which i will come up with in the Review Section.
Review
Starting Issues
The current release of the Sky Connect supports Zigbee already. But there are several Issues while setting up the USB Stick. As mentioned before the Notification does not pop-up as soon as you plug-in the Sky Connect to your Home Assistant Installation.
Currently known Issues
Under the Hardware Tab of your Settings in Home Assistant you can find the configuration option for the Sky Connect Stick. Unlikely here comes the first Problem. As soon as you press the configuration Button there comes a pop-up with the info about the current existing issue of Multi-pan. More Details about this are written here: Multi-pan temporarily disabled | Home Assistant Developer Docs (home-assistant.io)
ZHA Network Issues
In addition I started facing some personal problems with the ZigBee network of the USB Stick.
After setting up the Zigbee Network with the ZHA Integration (I used Deconz/Conbee II before) I was able to join my Devices to the Network. But they lose connection from time to time even after adjusting the ZHA Settings. In addition I could not rejoin some of my devices to the Network and wasn’t able to do so even after Resetting the ZHA Installation and the Sky Connect USB Stick.
IT-Auditor by day, Homelab-Bastler by night. Ich baue, teste und dokumentiere – von Proxmox-Clustern über Smart-Home-Setups bis hin zu 3D-Druck. Wenn du Technik so liebst wie ich, bist du hier genau richtig.