Home Assistant and Zigbee

After my Google Home Mini [devices started "dying"](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2024/10/google-home-minis-1st-gen-bricked.html) (aka getting remotely bricked) I was looking around for something less vendor-tied to perform the same tasks and found the [Home Assistant Voice Preview](https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/) which I have taken the plunge on. More on that later. And so I had to jump to the Home Assistant world from OpenHAB. Oh wow. This has been such a nice change. Everything about setting the thing up (I'm running a `hass` VM image on my NUC) was trouble-free, it runs well and when the time came to add a sprinkling of Zigbee, it was *so* easy I actually audibly gasped. I plugged in one of these Sonoff USB Zigbee gateways:

... went into my VM console and granted USB passthrough to the relevant (cryptically-named) device (points off to Sonoff here - couldn't you have changed the USB device name and vendor to something a little bit more ... obvious?)

And by the time I'd logged into the Home Assistant page, it had already discovered the gateway! Pairing with the multiple (cheap!) Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors was stupidly-simple and they've been rock-solid for weeks now. Much better than the wifi-based ones I've tried in the past.

Niiiice.