Hello,
I have a question about extending my Zigbee network to outdoors.
I have 2 sheds outside with 1 in the middle of the other and the house. I tried to extend the Zigbee network to the closest shed with Zigbee plugs, but it doesn’t work. I think it is already too far away to make a connection (and there is a thick wall in between and the closest plug to the shed is in the garage where the LQI is already low).
What can I do to still have a good Zigbee network in the second shed (the one the furthest away from home at approx. 25m)? There is a network cable going through this second shed.
Thanks!
There is a lot of devil in the details, and your description of your details is rather thin.
25 meters is not an excessive distance for Zigbee. Give a watch to the Youtube video of going on the order 1000 feet with line of sight.
LQI is not a very good measure of what is going on, depending on your combo of devices. That said, there are not any better measure of zigbee mesh. dBM, if available can be a small help.
You do not say how you are joining your router devices to your network, understanding the ‘join via’ function is important.
Again, thin info, you do not share the map if your Zigbee mesh network. Seeing how devices are connecting and routing is important.
The choice of your router devices and their placement is important. Again, thin info, you do not say what brand and model are your plugs. And yes, placing even a plug with a good antenna and power right up against a brick wall is not a good formula.
Using a device with and external antenna and placed higher up with better line of sight might be a good shot for a chance to extend your network, devices with external antennas and increased power such as the Sonoff dongle P based on the Texas Instruments 26xx chips placed in a window or attic can be a good start.
To you ethernet cable between building, using Zigbee2MQTT, you can have multiple Zigbee coordinators and ‘bridge’ their function via Home Assistant. There are a couple ways to use ‘remote’ coordinators with Zigbee2MQTT, either a ethernet connected coordinator device or a remote raspberry pi or similar device running zigbee2mqtt in the remote shed. I highly recommend Zigbee2MQTT over the built in ZHA zigbee system. And do not run Zigbee2mqtt and your MQTT broker withing HAOS, rather run them outside in docker containers.
Good hunting and to get useful help on the various forums, do share the details of your setup and steps.
I was going to say zigbee gateway.
https://uzg.zig-star.com/
New vid up about it
https://youtu.be/oRNvplBPBYA?si=wqkvdDZjtVBikUlS
Docker is just unnecessarily complicating things for the average non-geek user.
At this point I’ve been running the mqtt and z2m addons on five HA instances for going on three years. Sometimes multiple z2m addon instances per HA.
ZERO issues. All rock solid.
I was not aware that you could run more than one Zigbee2MQTT instance inside HAOS, I do not see that documented by Zigbee2MQTT. Perhaps you could describe how to do this to the OP. I believe to goal here is help find a solution.
There is a lot of missing information about how the OP is running their home automation setup and as I described more than one possible way to solve.
In my experience keeping these three systems isolated from each other via Docker has yielded the most stable home automation system. Even with the increased complexity of learning and standing up Docker. Also, since HAOS uses Docker, I am not sure having it and not understanding it’s there and how it operates is better.