Hi.
Did somebody know, if there is any device, that can extend Zigbee network over WiFi? (or generally over any IP network).
Imagine you have a house, where you have most of your zigbee devices, but you need also some zigbee devices somewhere in the garden on place, which is too far from house and there is no zigbee signal, but you already have an WiFi access point there (or UTP cable).
I think, that it could be possible - you can wrap almost everything in TCP packets, but I have currently no idea where to start…
As I understand it you still need a ZigBee Gateway to communicate to the Zigbee devices. You could look at extending the Zigbee Mesh Network by installing Zigbee devices that are powered. Other options might be to install a remote Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee stick and have that communicate back to HA, but that would require you running two instances of Zigbee which I have never tried so not sure how HA would handle that.
Basically what it does is converts your zigbee network traffic into an mqtt message that your mqtt broker receives from your lan (ethernet or wifi) that HA will also receive when it subscribes to the relevant topic on the same broker.
The only issue is you will need something to send the mqtt message from the zigbee device to your wifi. You could connect it to another pi with docker running on it that then runs zigbee2mqtt. Then zigbee2mqtt can use the wifi on the pi to transmit the mqtt to the broker.
Or if you decide to run the broker on that same pi then you can simply connect to that broker and subscribe to the proper topics on your HA.
Even it there is a hardware and/or software tunneling solution that is solid, seem like it would be sub optimal. Not sure how far is far in your setup, but if you can get a device like this up as high as possible at your house you might this more cost effective and stable. There are a lot of large outdoor zigbee networks, so it is possible. Remember, zigbee networks are very low bandwidth and pretty robust architecture, so if you can figure out a router layout that is solid and make sure your end devices can communicate via routers (I believe Aqara products are ones to AVOID for this), you should be successful.
Maybe two of these, on at the house and one at the garden: