How to Use SONOFF Dongle Plus on Home Assistant? How to Flash Firmware?

by zoe66zheng | Sep 23, 2021 | Product Review, Tutorial

1. Use Dongle Plus on Home Assistant via ZHA Integration

Precondition
Steps

1. Use Dongle Plus on Home Assistant via ZHA Integration

There are two ways to use the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus to manage your Zigbee devices on Home Assistant: ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT. Here I will introduce ZHA, which is simpler in configuration.

Precondition:

Install Home Assistant

A Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant installed. Connect your computer to the same Wi-Fi as the Raspberry Pi and enter the address into your browser to open the Hass page.

homeassistant.local:8123

If you have not yet successfully installed Home Assistant, please find the relevant tutorials on the Internet to complete the installation and I will not repeat them here.

Install Driver

Raspberry Pi (Linux) is recommended, if you use Windows or macOS, you need to install Driver first.

ZBDongle-P:

Windows: CP210x_Windows_Drivers_with_Serial_Enumeration

ZBDongle-E:

Windows: CH343SER

macOS: ch34xser_macos-main

As the “Product Description String” of the dongle plus has been customed to a unique identifier “Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus”, which has been also added to Home Assistant’s whitelist of auto-discovered devices, the configuration of the dongle in Hass can be very simple. Just plug the dongle into your computer, it will be automatically discovered, click “CONFIGURE” to complete the configuration automatically, and then add sub-devices to use.

If your dongle can’t be auto-discovered, it may be because your version of Hass hasn’t integrated this feature yet, you can follow the normal configuration steps below.

Normal Configuration Steps:

Insert the dongle and add ZHA Integration

2. Select the corresponding port

3. Select access method

ZBDongle-E:

ZBDongle-P:

4. Data flow control

ZBDongle-P: do not select, just click next

Reserve the hardware flow control DIP switch, see the following document on how to generate the corresponding firmware, but no platform support currently.

ZBDongle-E: choose software flow control

5. Add successfully

6. Add sub-devices to the gateway dongle

7. Make the sub-devices enter the pairing mode, and you can control it after adding successfully

2. Use ZBDongle-E on openHAB

Refer to the official website tutorial to install and start openHAB.

1. Add ZBDongle-E

2. Add sub-devices

3. Control device

3. Firmware Flashing

The Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus comes pre-flashed with coordinator firmware, but if you would like to update, change to router firmware and add to the dongle or generate the firmware that supports hardware flow control, please read the following document.