Manage Zigbee devices with IoT Hub

Reviewed on 02 January 2024 • Published on 20 December 2022

iot
iot-hub
zigbee
zigbee2mqtt

Privacy and security concerns should be at the forefront of any deployment of connected devices used to monitor or automate actions in our physical environment. Zigbee is a recognized protocol to create a mesh network of sensors and actuators in houses and apartments. However, a proprietary gateway is often used to send commands and receive information to and from this network. It results in a trade-off in control over the security level and the automation and monitoring capabilities. This tutorial aims to set the foundation of a fully configurable solution based on the open source zigbee2mqtt software and the IoT Hub managed service from Scaleway.

Scaleway IoT Hub is a resilient and MQTT message broker with export capabilities. The use of a message broker will enable us to increase the interoperability of the solution.

Creating an IoT Hub

Create an IoT Hub (shared plan) for testing purposes, following the available documentation. Dedicated and High availability plans remain recommended for more critical workloads.
Add a new device to the Hub, with the option “Deny insecure connection” selected. You need to download «Download Icon» the device certificate and device private key, as well as the Device ID.
Download «Download Icon» the certificate used to secure the MQTT endpoint in the Networks tabs.

Installation and configuration of Zigbee2mqtt

Zigbee2mqtt can be installed on a single board computer such as a Raspberry Pi and you should follow first the installation instructions. This tutorial assumes that you have a proper installation of Zigbee2mqtt and that your network of connected devices is configured.

Configuration of MQTT

Zigbee2MQTT is configured using YAML based configuration.yaml file. Modify this configuration file to include the following MQTT settings.

Note

The force_disable_retain should be set to true when using the IoT Hub shared service level because this functionality is unavailable on this plan.

# Required: MQTT settings
mqtt:
  server: mqtts://iot.fr-par.scw.cloud:8883
  base_topic: zigbee2mqtt
  ca: /etc/ssl/mqtt-ca.crt
  key: /etc/ssl/mqtt-client.key
  cert: /etc/ssl/mqtt-client.crt
  client_id: <Device_ID>
  keepalive: 60
  version: 4
  force_disable_retain: true

Note

Do not forget to copy and paste the certificates, private key and Device ID from previous step:

The /etc/ssl/mqtt-ca.crt file is the certificate used to secure the MQTT endpoint
The /etc/ssl/mqtt-client.key file is the device certificate
The /etc/ssl/mqtt-client.crt file is the device private key
The <Device_ID> is the Device ID

As soon as the configuration is done, you will see some metrics on the Scaleway console.

Thanks to Scaleway built-in integration, similar metrics to monitor the performance of your IoT Hub are also available on your Scaleway Observability dashboard.