Extending the zigbee network with a gap

Hardware
1

My situation is as follows;
I have my home where the server + sonoff zigbee dongle lives. In there everything is working properly.

Then, about 50 meters away from my house I have a studio building, I’ve got a wired ethernet connection to it. I also have a Philips Hue hub there which mainly controls my garden lights, it works as it should through HA. But I want to implement devices (zigbee) which don’t work with HUE + i want to move away from hue since they are enforcing their cloud service. I bought the SLZB-06 to connect it to ethernet, put it in router mode and start accepting devices in the studio. However, that isn’t working. It’s not finding any devices. It is present in HA, both at it’s own integration and in ZHA.

Am I thinking wrongly this should work?

I presumed with the ethernet extension the (possubly missing) overlap would be bridged. Was I wrong?

I presume setting it as coordinator would conflict with the Sonoff usb dongle setup through ZHA.

How to solve this problem and bridge the gap?

2

With a 50 meter gap I think the better approach would be to install Z2M and run the SLZB as a coordinator, creating a second zigbee network in your studio.

A SLZB will not transport any Zigbee data over the ethernet connection.

1 Like
3

All zigbee traffic is wireless, and still has to traverse the 50m gap wirelessly.

Nothing is bridged over the ethernet link. Functionally, the SLZB-06 router is essentially no different than something like a Sonoff Dongle-P flashed with router firmware, only differnce is it might be POE powered vs plugged into a USB power block.

You can’t have two ZHA networks in HA currently. As previously suggested, you could flash as a coordinator and manage it using zigbee2mqtt. ZHA and z2m can run side by side.

4

You can have 2 Zigbee networks if one is ZHA and the other is Z2M. I do that myself.

5

Thanks everyone for the input. I will make 2 networks then. As long as I can access my devices I’m fine with it.

I do have a shed in the middle, there’s electricity there. Is there a possible solution to make it overlap? Or is that too far?

6

You could try with a router in the shed.