In ZHA do repeaters all have to connect to the coordinator, or can I connect several repeaters in a chain to reach some distant devices??? Hard to tell when I cannot understand from the Visualization map if this is possible…
The “routers” (repeaters) will connect as they want and optimize the network later automatically.
If you want to force a device (in this case: a router) to connect to a specific router → you can do that in Zigbee2MQTT (I don’t know if that’s possible with ZHA).
The short answer is yes, (you will get better result if then use “known good” Zigbee Router devices).
Zigbee uses mesh networking and supports a maximum number of 255 “hops” via Zigbee routers:
So yes Zigbee devices in a Zigbee network mesh can multiple hop via multiple Zigbee Router devices that connect in a serie, or daisy chain if you will though that terminology is strickly used for wired connections and not wireless, instead the terminology for Zigbee uses terms “hop” and “hop count”.
Note however that each additional hop will add a little more latency/delay so if you have very long distance to cover then it is a good idea to consider converting a few Zigbee USB dongles to convert them to standard-alone dedicated Zigbee Router devices (powered via USB-changers) and preferably then use a model with external antenna (like Sonoff ZBDongle-E and Sonoff ZBDongle-P models by ITead) so that you have the option to replace the antennas with better ones (you could even use a directional antenna to get very far distances outdoors as long as devices have line-of-sight of each other). See example:
While you can perform joining/pairning via a specific Zigbee Router in either the ZHA integration or Zigbee2MQTT that does not mean that it will stay connected forver to that device, so you can not force it to stay connected to the same Zigbee Router devices, as instead it will always evaluate connetion to its neighboring devices and automatically move to another Zigbee Router once every 24-hours if it sees one that constantly has a better connection during that peroid. So understand that a Zigbee network will automatically organize all the meshing in its mesh networking so there is nothing you can do to affect how they connect to each other other than adding more Zigbee Router devices:
Regardless, highly recommend that you read and try to follow all the best-practice tips in this guide:
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