Does anyone familiar with Zigbee have an opinion about this?
A superb price, I'd say worth a punt.
I have been waiting for them to come back into stock. They should be much better than the cheap CC2531 based dongles, which are pretty rubbish and are no longer recommended by the zigbee website. I need to see if I can find them in the UK.
They're on eBay for about £16 (UK seller)
Have you got a link for that? I didn't see it.
Ah, the picture stated "UK store" but the eBay delivery said Hong Kong. My bad.
I waited for the ElectroLama device to come back in stock and got one of those. It is excellent.
I have seen that before, also ones claiming to be shipping from the UK, but when you look at the delivery it is 25 days or so, which means that it isn't UK really, just that they have a UK rep.
I have ordered one from Itead, and a motion sensor, total £19 including delivery. I may have to pay a bit for import tax, I don't know what the rules are now.
Yes, I'll be interested to see what happens with that. Please do let us know.
I think the VAT is charged/collected by the supplier and then paid to the UK Gov.
Well at least all the 'stuff' I've bought from China this year has been like that - so no worries about having to pay import tax or VAT before the item is delivered to your door.
Unfortunately, VAT and import duties are different. VAT is meant to be charged at source for anything that is sold to the UK. But import duties can be really complex and most sellers/vendors try to avoid dealing with them - at least without extra charges. I think that Bangood for example have an optional surcharge that ensures that you don't have to worry about them? There used to be a floor for import duties set at £18 I think, anything you purchased under that cost would be ignored. But I believe that has now been removed.
The £18 has gone. Everything I've ordered from AliExpress or Banggood has a line-item for VAT at 20%.
Even the PCBs I've been ordering from JLCpcb have a VAT element.
It just means everything is a bit more expensive than it used to be.
Ordered with a SNZB-02 Temperature and Humidity Sensor, $26 including shipping. I haven't found any information on which sensor(s) the T-RH sensor uses, but it seems worth a try.
Is it the same as Ali are selling at £8.63 delivered?
About £3.80 shipping to the UK direct from itead ($4.71).
I use a couple of those for room temperature monitoring and control. I did have a problem because it wasn't reporting the temperature often enough. After some research I determined that this is configurable in Zigbee2MQTT. In the Zigbee2MQTT install files (default /opt/zigbee2mqtt) the file node_modules/zigbee-herdsman-converters/devices/sonoff.js, line 107 currently has
await reporting.temperature(endpoint, {min: 5, max: constants.repInterval.MINUTES_30, change: 50});
The change: 50
appears to mean that it should report if the temperature changes more than 0.5C. The max
setting tells it to report at least once every 30 mins (even if it has not changed). The min: 5
means not faster then 5 seconds.
I experimented a bit and came up with this as a good setting for me
await reporting.temperature(endpoint, {min: 5, max: constants.repInterval.MINUTES_5, change: 15}
So it reports at least every 5 minutes, or if the temperature changes by more than 0.15C (which is above the noise band of the device).
Obviously the battery will run down more quickly, but I have had them running for a couple of months and the batteries are still reporting 100%, so how long they will last remains to be seen.
I don't have a zigbee temperature sensor on my Zigbee2MQTT network (they are only on my Wiser Zigbee network) as I use my own sensor platforms. However, looking at the Ikea PIR that I do have, I think that you should be able to set all of that from the web interface without messing with JavaScript?
My investigations suggest that it cannot be setup via the web interface, or the app config file.