Arteco ZG-807Z USB Zigbee Extender

Configuration Zigbee
1

Has anyone had any experience using these USB zigbee extenders within a Z2M environment. I have an outbuilding which I want to reach with a zigbee signal. Currently, despite the coordinator being in my loft (SMLight SLZB-06), zigbee signal in the outbuilding is low making pairing of devices erratic.

I was considering getting two of these devices and installing them in waterproof boxes on the outside wall of each building with the antenna exposed and a 5v supply to them which would be easy to do.
I know I can flash a Sonoff ZBDongle-P or ZBDongle-E but these are a lot more expensive if the Arteco ZG-807Z are found to be stable repeaters unlike some of the Tuya USB repeaters. The non antenna Hobeian variant is already supported by Z2mqtt.

2

I had the same problem with an outdoor shed. What fixed it was putting a mains-powered Zigbee outlet in the shed itself — it links back to the nearest mains-powered device indoors, and from there the shed has a solid signal for everything else I’ve added since. No purpose-built repeater involved.

That’s the general point really: any mains-powered Zigbee device is a router, and the “USB extender” products are essentially a router in a stick. It’s why the flaky Tuya ones are a firmware problem rather than a category problem. I’m at 72 devices and every dead spot I’ve fixed has been fixed the same way — a mains-powered device I wanted anyway, placed at the edge.

So if you’re already running power to a waterproof box on each wall, a decent Zigbee smart plug in that box does the same job for about the same money, and you get a switchable outlet out of it. Same topology you were planning, minus the gamble on repeater firmware.

One thing worth knowing: the mesh will sort itself out, but not always quickly. Mains-powered routers re-route on their own fairly readily. Battery end devices are the slow ones — they stay with the parent they joined until that link actually starts failing, so after adding a router you may not see much change for a while. If you don’t want to wait it out, re-pair the shed devices while they’re physically out there and they’ll pick the nearer parent straight away.

And if the SLZB-06 is running over USB rather than PoE, check what’s near it — USB 3.0 splatter sits right on top of the 2.4GHz band and can cost you range before you’ve spent anything.

3

Many thanks @elcom . I’ll give you suggestion a try. The devices I want to install are zigbee relays which operate the 240v solenoids on my irrigation systems so they should act as a router.

I have a bungalow that has a floor in the loft space with a ring main so have already used zigbee plugs as routers throughout most of my home. I bought lots of Ikea Tretakt plugs when they were reduced to £6.00 as end of life now that Ikea has switched to Matter. A downside however is they take up a socket outlet and can inadvertently turned off, therefore removing the power from certain key devices. I have had to hide the switch entities in HA to stop them being turned off.
I had considered using my old telephone wiring as a 5v ring main as there’s a BT socket in every room. I could then connect a USB repeater behind every telephone socket so its our of site but acting as a repeater. I can use the same telephone wiring to power the two Arteco repeaters without having to run a mains supply for a plug.
I’ll see if anyone else posts with their experience of these devices and maybe take a punt. They are only about £5.50 UK pounds each.

4

I have been thinking about how I would go about doing this for some time now and if I were, this is how I would go about doing it:

1.) Do you have an ethernet connection between each building? If I had multiple ones, I would have them connected via fiber (lighting suppression) with PoE switches inside them.

2.) Install a Raspberry PI in the other two buildings, I would still put one in your main building with Home Assistant so it can be placed as central to the area of coverage as you can. If you install a Power over Ethernet hat on them, they can be powered by your PoE switch and you can drag a Cat-5 cable from each switch to the center most area of each building.

3.) Install MQTT either on your Home Assistant instance or on its own instance and set up a MQTT username and password to use. You can use separate ones if you wish for each building or all the same. I would recommend using usernames and passwords for MQTT communication.

4.) Install Zigbee2MQTT on each Raspberry PI and point it back to your MQTT instance.

I think you can also apply this concept if you have a large building where Zigbee does not really propagate across the space, too. You, essentially, make these Raspberry PIs Zigbee access points where Zigbee is collected and backboned over Ethernet instead of WiFi using an Ethernet backbone.

At my home, I have a Raspberry PI 4B running Zigbee2MQTT, along with Z-Wave and an SDR radio because my HA setup is a VM on a server in my basement and has no USB ports. The PI is up on the main floor on a shelf running off of PoE. All my “USB” stuff runs off that PI and I could add more if I needed to. Basically, you can install anything that would translate to MQTT on that PI and expand those environments, too. Kind of wish there was a Z-Wave2MQTT.

And, if you do have Ethernet connections between the building (again, recommend fiber because of lightning suppression and limiting potential problems), you can stick access points out there and expand your wireless coverage, too.

MQTT was originally developed for small IoT devices in industrial settings where small devices had to aggregate small bits of information they collected so the entire process could see the big picture, just like your home automatition does.

5

Many thanks @kahilzinger
If I were starting from scritch I would seriously consider your suggestion. however I think its too much of overkill for my particular scenario. I have a number of Sonoff and Tuya wifi devices mainly relays but some plugs, which I bought when I first set out on my smart home journey. However they are the only devices which are unreliable and keep going offline, whereas my zigbee relays are rock solid. I’ll try the repeater route first but someone else finding your post might be glad of the information so thanks for replying.
As an aside Zigbee can only have one coordinator. It’s a limit set by zigbee itself rather than Z2M or ZHA etc. Is your suggestion in fact two separate zigbee networks using Raspberry Pi’s as coordinators that are linked by ethernet backbone and report back to a single instance of MQTT?

6

I cannot remember if that was Zigbee or Z-Wave for the limitation. My thought was if several funneled it into MQTT, that may be a way around it if it was.

With people having out buildings, I could see where getting rid of that single device limitation is needed, sooner than later.

7

Just a quick note that Home Assistant is happy to run both ZHA and Z2M at the same time - you do need 2 coordinators and each network has to be on a different channel but the HA setup is trivial - more specifically ZHA is pretty trivial, so the only difficultly is setting up Z2M.

I currently have both ZHA and Z2M - I had an issue early on that mean’t I couldn’t move one device, however I can probably move everything to Z2M now (as I have learnt more).
It’s just that I never got around to moving it as having a second network really hasn’t caused any problems.

Others have tried using two Z2M installations so I believe that is possible.

Anyway cutting to the chase, if you have ethernet in a outbuilding you can probably just throw a network attached coordinator out there and run everything else (docker/Z2M/ZHA/HA) centrally.

8

Thanks @dtrott . That’s a good point. I do have a Cat6 cable to the outbuilding.

I have Z2M for all my devices in the house but could set up a separate coordinator on ZHA just for the shed which is primarily irrigation and stuff not directly connected to the devices in the house. The only other devices would be door sensors, but assume Home Assistant will cope with grouping these together with door and window sensors in the house under the security tile even though they are on a separate zigbee network??

9

I think that all sensors of type “window” or “door” appear on the security dashboard, if you are asking about the order in which they are displayed on that dashboard I have no idea.

10

One thing that might simplify this: a smart plug switched “off” is still a router. The relay only cuts the load — the plug’s own electronics and radio stay powered, which has to be true or you couldn’t switch it back on. So if you’re placing one purely to fill a gap in the mesh, it genuinely doesn’t matter whether it’s on or off, or whether anything is plugged into it. You only lose the router by physically unplugging it or killing the wall socket.

On the accidental-switching worry, there are two settings on most of these worth knowing about rather than hiding the entity. Mine are TS011F-type plugs through Z2M and they expose both:

Child lock — disables the physical button on the plug entirely, so it can only be switched from HA.

Power outage memory — sets what the plug does when mains power returns. Mine are set to “on”, so after a cut everything comes back up rather than the plug sitting there off with a key device dead behind it. That’s the one that actually bit me conceptually — it’s not the accidental press you need to worry about so much as a power cut leaving things in the wrong state.

Between the two you get a plug that can’t be fiddled with and always comes back on, which is a better outcome than hiding the switch in HA.