I’m trying to learn about Thread networks. I have a very small experimental network. Just one Aqara H2 switch, two Nanoleaf bulbs, and the three border routers.
The BRs are Apple HomePod, Aqra M100 hub, and an ESP Border router development board. The board runs OTBR on an ESP32-S3 and the RCP on an H2.
All is well, and I can use the Web GUI that runs on the ESP32-S3 as well as the CLI.
Here is my question: Can I influence which of the BRs is selected? The reason is that of the three, only one of them has an Ethernet connection. The others are WiFi. I would like to keep the data off my WiFi. This small Thread network will not saturate my WiFi, but I am looking forward to a much larger network.
Of course, I could force all the data onto Ethernet by using only Ethernet BRs, but that is not practical as so many devices you buy today have BRs inside.
I’d like to be able to somehow say "use this BR first, if you can, then this one 2nd, and so on.”
Question #2: Are there better Thread network monitoring tools than the Web GUI that is built into OTBR? I am kind of spoiled by z2m
Not that I know of. The Thread network generates its own IPv6 prefix for Thread devices to use for communicating outside the Thread network, and the TBRs advertise this prefix as a Route Advertisement that HA then uses to install routes to reach these devices. While in theory, one could configure the metrics of these routes so that HA prefers using one TBR over the other, its not practical since these prefixes are rather dynamic, meaning the Thread network prefix changes, causing new routes to be advertised and thus HA ends up with new routes, and (eventually) removes the old routes.
Probably the better one is the one used by Matter.js Server (which is currently in Beta). It gives you the ability of “naming” the nodes which shows up on the map with these names and some ideas of link quality. I would say that the only drawback is that the Matter Server gets the Thread networking information from the Matter/Thread devices themselves, and some of this information can be a bit stale, and it can show Thread nodes that Matter doesn’t know about but does show it on the map as a kind of unknown node.