Zigbee and MQTT Integration

Integrated Zigbee devices with MQTT

You can create Pub/Sub nodes in Krill to send and receive MQTT messages, allowing you to integrate with Zigbee devices through an MQTT broker. This enables you to control Zigbee devices and receive their status updates in real time.

To set this up, you would typically have a Zigbee to MQTT bridge (like Zigbee2MQTT) that connects your Zigbee devices to an MQTT broker. In Krill, you can create Pub/Sub nodes that subscribe to the relevant MQTT topics for your Zigbee devices to receive updates, and publish to those topics to send commands.

This also of course opens up the possibility of integrating with any other MQTT-enabled devices or services, allowing for a highly flexible and extensible automation system. You can create complex workflows in Krill that react to changes in your Zigbee devices or send commands based on other triggers in your system.

To get started, you need to setup an MQTT Broker and for this tutorial, Zigbee2MQTT is a great option for bridging Zigbee devices to MQTT. Once you have that set up, you can create Pub/Sub nodes in Krill to connect to your MQTT broker and start integrating your Zigbee devices into your automation workflows.

Step 1: Follow the instructions on the Zigbee2MQTT website to set up the bridge and connect your Zigbee devices.

As with most of the tutorials on this site, I like to use a Raspberry Pi with the Lite version of the OS as there’s no need for a desktop environment and it can run headless in the background. You can also run this on any Debian based server if you have one available.