What happened
On October 13, a Home Assistant community member posting as bitEngine shared a prototype gateway called the bitEngine Hub and asked for feedback in the Share your Projects forum. It is a single PoE box with two separate 802.15.4 radios. An EFR32MG24 running EmberZNet acts as a Zigbee coordinator, and an ESP32-C5 runs an OpenThread Border Router (OTBR) on the device itself. Both run at the same time, on their own channels and antennas, with no multiprotocol firmware.
The pitch is simple: put the radios in a central spot on one Ethernet cable, even if the Home Assistant server lives in a corner or a VM.
How it would connect
- Zigbee: a network coordinator reachable at a TCP address on port 6638, added to ZHA. Zigbee2MQTT with the ember driver should work the same way, but it has not been tested yet.
- Thread: a standard OTBR added through Home Assistant’s Open Thread Border Router integration. Because OTBR runs on the box, the network carries plain IPv6 and the OTBR REST API, not a raw radio protocol tunnelled to the HA host.
That means no OTBR add-on, and the Thread mesh does not depend on the HA host being up.
The hardware, as described
- Uplink: 10/100 Ethernet with 802.3af PoE, or 5 GHz Wi-Fi. Power can also come from USB-C 5 V.
- Two external SMA antennas, one per radio.
- 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is switched off on purpose to leave that band to Zigbee and Thread.
- The prototype enclosure is 3D-printed; aluminium extrusion is planned for production.
The limits, and they are real
This is not a product you can buy. FCC and CE testing is only being planned, and the poster says it is not for sale until that is done. The test record is thin: Home Assistant 2026.4.1 with ZHA, three Zigbee devices and two Matter-over-Thread devices, seven days of uptime. The poster themself says that does not clear the “rock-stable” bar one commenter set.
The 5 GHz Wi-Fi option shares the ESP32-C5’s radio with Thread on a time-sliced basis, so the poster recommends Ethernet. Both networks also sit in one location. If your house needs the coordinator and the border router in different places, two devices are still the better answer.
Firmware (the ESP32-C5 side) is planned as Apache-2.0 and schematics under CERN-OHL-P v2, but nothing is public yet. The poster says it will be published before units go to other testers. Gerbers and board layout are not planned, at least initially.
This is not a new category
Commenters pointed out that SMLIGHT already sells a range of dual-radio units that run Zigbee and Thread at once on separate chips, including the SLZB-MR series and SMhub. The poster accepted the correction and edited the original post. SMLIGHT’s U-series has an on-device OTBR mode that its docs mark as beta; on the Hub it is the only mode. On price, the poster pointed to a “€55 MR1” as the benchmark and wrote: “Whether that’s worth anything next to a €55 MR1 is exactly what I’m trying to find out.”
What it means for an installed system
- Do not wait for it. There is no price, no ship date and no certification. If you need a dual-radio coordinator now, the existing SMLIGHT units are the ones already on the market.
- Do not migrate for it. Moving a working Zigbee network to a new coordinator means re-pairing or a careful backup and restore. A seven-day test on three devices is not a reason to touch a stable mesh.
- Check where your radios sit. If your Zigbee and Thread devices are spread across a house, one central box may not suit you. Plan the placement before you buy any all-in-one.
- Prefer a wire. The poster’s own advice, and ours: serial-over-IP coordinators behave better over Ethernet than Wi-Fi.
- Watch the firmware release. Open firmware and schematics would let others check the claims. Until they appear and larger networks are tested, treat this as an interesting prototype, not a recommendation.
If you have a large Zigbee network or a mixed Matter-over-Thread setup, the poster is looking for outside testers later. That is the place to add real data, not a reason to buy.