Setting Up Sonoff Zigbee Dongle-E with Zigbee2MQTT

even though it was eaiser to setup ZHA with dongle-E, I quickly gave up on it as it was very clunky.

the setup for sonoff zigbee dongle-P is quite straight forward and well documented in tutorials and youtube videos but the same does not work with dongle-E, which is the newer version. i made the mistake of ordering dongle-E.

the main difference between them is the chip being used (due to the supply chain shortages). dongle-P, the earlier version, had the well supported CC2652P while the newer version has EFR32MG.

with dongle-E, you will have to use zigbee2MQTT edge, which is synced to the dev branch and not guaranteed to be as stable but my experience with it has been okay till now with a dozen devices from mutiple manufactures pairing seamlessly with no dropoffs.

while setting up your MQTT broker, the usual tutorials tell you to add the following line to your config file

serial:
  port: 
    /dev/serial/by-id/usb-ITEAD_SONOFF_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_20220712193401-if00

but your broker will keep on crashing with the above config. dongle-E requires you to pass in an additional parameter as below

serial:
  port:
    /dev/serial/by-id/usb-ITEAD_SONOFF_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_20220712193401-if00
  adapter: ezsp

this should allow you to connect to the broker and pair your devices. but if you have the choice, get dongle-P instead of dongle-E.