I want to move my garden irrigation system to Zigbee and got a Sonoff 3.0 USB Dongle Plus
These exist in two variants, mine is a ZBDongle-E, as is indicated on the box. I want to use it with Zigbee2MQTT, so the first step is to flash a new firmware to the device. It turns out this is actually quite easy.

Plug the device in, it should show up in dmesg a serial device.

709223.185691] usb 1-3: new full-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
[709223.340450] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=10c4, idProduct=ea60, bcdDevice= 1.00
[709223.340476] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[709223.340483] usb 1-3: Product: Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2
[709223.340487] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: Itead
[709223.340489] usb 1-3: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[709223.342950] cp210x 1-3:1.0: cp210x converter detected
[709223.345094] usb 1-3: cp210x converter now attached to ttyUSB0

First we need to make it accessible:

sudo chmod 666 /dev/ttyUSB0

Easiest way to flash is via google chome, as i am on debian its just an „apt-get chromium“ away.

In chromium go to Silabs Firmware flasher scroll to „ZBDongle-E“ and follow the instructions. This will automatically install the newest version, at the time of writing this is 7.4.4 which is documented to work with zigbee2mqtt.

After flashing, create a data folder (mkdir data) and a docker-compose.yaml file:

version: '3.8'
services:
    zigbee2mqtt:
        container_name: zigbee2mqtt
        image: koenkk/zigbee2mqtt
        restart: unless-stopped
        volumes:
            - ./data:/app/data
            - /run/udev:/run/udev:ro
        ports:
            # Frontend port
            - 8080:8080
        environment:
            - TZ=Europe/Berlin
        devices:
            # Make sure this matched your adapter location
            - /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Itead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_xxxxxxxxxxxxx-if00-port0:/dev/serial/by-id/usb-Itead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-if00-port0

fire it up with docker-compose up, it will fail, press CTRL-C to abort.

Now edit data/configuration.yaml as root, fix your mqtt server address and add this section:

serial:
  port: /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Itead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_2xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-if00-port0
  adapter: ember

Now fire up the container again and it should work. See localhost:8080 for confirmation.

(If it does not you might still be using an old container, do „docker container prune“ to remove all stopped containers and try again)