Aubess Zigbee Smart Switch (relay) - power metering and using as a router

Hardware
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1

Hello all,

I’ve bought a few of these smart switches and have been using them just fine for the past week. The trouble is, three of them are downstairs, on the opposite side of the house in relation to the Home Assistant device and I cannot connect to them.

I’ve tried to pair them via another such smart relay which is located half way between HA and the three – using “Add devices via this device” in HA. However, nothing happens - neither of the three remote relays appear.

So, here are my two questions:

  1. Does anyone know if these smart switches can act as routers (I believe this is the term), i.e. to extend the Zigbee network and/or any special setting needs to be enabled for that to happen?
  2. Unrelated to the above, none of the switches show energy consumption, even though they’ve been in use for a week. Again, should I do anything special for this type of information to appear in HA?

Thank you!

2

Zigbee was a hit and miss for me - specially the more economic devices.

You might be able to get more functions (like the power monitoring) supported with some random quirks floating around on github. And/Or using z2mqtt.

In the end I got rid of all my ZigBee (and few matter) devices because they just were the opposite easy to get up and running with all advertised functions and in general just didn’t perform stable.

Today I only have rock solid devices that are all 100% supported by HA thanks to esphome. Beside they are cheaper than ZigBee devices and don’t depend on the poor mesh but just use my present WiFi.

3

Could you elaborate more on that, please? I’m still new to the whole HA environment and don’t know how it relates to ESPhome. Thanks!

4

They are routers, and they don’t support power monitoring (there is no description of power monitoring on the page, and they simply don’t have it)

And you can’t flash them to ESPHome, so ignore that comment.

5

Long story short: avoid ZigBee

Esphome devices work with WiFi and can be installed on a lot if compatible hardware including many tuya devices.

6

Every time someone asks help with a Zigbee problem you come with this “help”. Zigbee can be rock solid.

1 Like
7

My experiences were different and I used to own ZigBee devices from aubess (tuya and others)…

8

Why do they expose these sensors, then?

SCR-20231028-qcx
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9

Good question, mine do not show them. Are you using Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA ?

Your page leads to these :
afbeelding

but maybe they were detected as
afbeelding

if you have the second one, you need a custum quirk if using ZHA:

10

I’m using ZHA. Could you explain how I should apply/use this “quirk”, please?

11
  1. Create a custom quirk dir in HA, e.g., /config/custom_zha_quirks
  2. In configuration.yaml, point to this directory:
zha:
  custom_quirks_path: /config/custom_zha_quirks/

in this directory, create the python file with content of the quirk

12

I agree, my Zibgee network has been rock solid and you can supposedly view the mesh under visualisation in ZHA:

image
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I don’t really want another 40 odd devices on my WiFi and having these on a Zigbee network negates most of the security concerns associated with these cheap devices.

The cheap Ikea lights appear to act as routers so these might be an option to extend the range.

2 Likes
13

I just checked and my devices are marked as “Mini Smart Switch” on the outside. Do I still need this custom quirk?

14

Best ask here:

1 Like