#Newbie to HA in Australia: where to buy HA Green and ZBT-1 dongle

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

astral orchid
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Hi everyone, I'm into the Home Assistant rabbit hole the last few weeks, and finally preparing to buy a Home Assistant Green with Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 dongle.

Does anyone have any experience buying them in Australia? there are a couple of websites (smarthome.com.au and smartguys.com.au) , but I can hardly find anything on them (reviews, social media posts, etc.), which makes me uneasy to buy from them

Was hoping someone could share any experience or recommendation they have for me to get my hands on the hardware

Thanks!

bitter aspen
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I can't provide any feedback on specific vendors in Australia as I live elsewhere - but something to consider is to look for alternate products which might be sold by vendors/stores you're more familiar with. You can run HAOS on standard PC hardware, so many folks here recommend using a mini PC or refurbished office PC. Also consider other Zigbee dongles which use the same chipset as the ZBT-1 - e.g. the SMLIGHT SLZB-07 or Sonoff ZBDongle-E work well (firmware for those is available here: https://darkxst.github.io/silabs-firmware-builder/ )

astral orchid
bitter aspen
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yeah - a benefit to starting with PC hardware is that many enthusiasts here have a spare pc they can use for it (or even a virtual machine on some other computer). If you have something like that, you might be able to try out HA without needing to get new hardware at all.

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(other than the zigbee dongle of course, but that can be moved to a different system later)

astral orchid
bitter aspen
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I should note that https://smartguys.com.au/ is the site that home assistant's own page links to for people who want shipping to australia