I ordered a really cheap c2531 (mistake #1) from aliexpress. Managed to get it flashed with a raspberry Pi, plugged into HASS and installed ZHA.
I have 4 Xiaomi smart zigbee power plugs and 6 temperature sensors. I understand the “AC Powered” zigbee stuff turns into a “router” for mesh use, so this should extend my coverage greatly. I was previous using all these devices with the Xiaomi Zigbee hub using the Mi app, and that used to work great.
Unfortunately, I am finding that with HomeAssistant + USB Zigbee C2531, my plugs seem to regularly disconnect (once every coulpe of hours or so), and my temp sensors have been offline for about 12 of the last 24 hours. I also had a ton of difficulty getting the temp sensors added to ZHA/HA (I had to try 3 or 4 times to actually get them added - a problem I never had with the Xiaomi hub).
Is there something wrong with my stick? Or is this level of performance to be expected? I thought Zigbee performance was supposed to be pretty good especially if you’ve got “Router” devices (i.e. AC powered zigbee devices that act as “hubs” on the network)
Agree, you should not use the CC2531 as it lacks the processing power to manage a zigbee network at the hardware/chip level, and will frequently lock up. I had the same issues and they went away when I updated to one of the better CC2652 based chips.
I recently posted on this other thread with someone having the same issues with the CC2531 chip. Although it was zigbee2mqtt, the problem will exist no matter if you’re using ZHA or zigbee2mqtt.
Unfortunately there is zero improvement to pairing. I have to be right on top of the coordinator (practically with LoS) to get pairing to work. However once the devices are paired, they seem to work great, even if I take them to the other end of my house.
Hi!
There is a solution? These are very old topics. I have been using ZHA since the beginning.
It was stable for a very long time and worked without problems. Now it breaks several times a day. In this case, if I restart the HA system, it works for a few hours. No error message. Sonoff Zigbee BR (ezsp)
@mwav3 - unfortunately things have not gotten better. My “mesh” consists of 7 x “lumi.plug” devices, i.e. Xiaomi Zigbee Power Plugs w/ Energy Measurement and 8 x “lumi.sensor_ht” devices (i.e. Xiaomi Zigbee Temperature sensors - the round one with no display).
The plugs are all mains powered, so they should be repeaters.
However, I cannot add any devices (be they temp sensors or plugs) when I’m not less than 1 meter line of sight from my coordinator, which is a “Sonoff” Zigbee CC2652. It comes up as a Texas Instruments CC1352/CC2652, Z-Stack 3.30+ (build 20210708) inside my home assistant instance, added to ZHA.
I was able to get it connected after many tries of clicking “Scan” in ZHA and hitting the pairing button on the switch but shortly after it disconnected. H
This is all old stuff I bought before I got into Home Assistant so getting it to work (mostly) with HASS was a treat. But as it stands, getting new devices added is a bit of a nightmare that doesn’t quite work properly, and only works if I’m less than 1 meter from my Zigbee stick/home assistant box.
Maybe it’s a limitation of the Xiaomi devices?
Based on the device map though, it is showing that a mesh is formed.
Likely, and it appears you found the post that mentions the issue. They don’t fully support the zigbee standard, so will have issues with other devices. Do you have any of the devices from the “reported NOT to work” list? If so you will constantly have issues and really can’t run the devices together on the same network.
I have some Xiaomi motion sensors, but no mains powered Xiaomi devices. They are paired well with my Ikea Tradfri outlets acting as repeaters (a device I bought specifically since it is on the “report to work” list), but when there is a power outage I still sometimes have to re-pair the Xiaomi devices. Also, I would not rely on any Xiaomi device to act as a repeater, especially for any non-Xiaomi device, due to the issues with them not complying with the zigbee standard.
If you really want to use the Xiaomi devices and are still having issues, you might just want to get their hub and use the Xiaomi integration to bring the devices to Home Assistant. The integration works locally and their hub is not very expensive.
