As a preface, I understand how to bind Zigbee devices together using ZHA, whether it is directly to singular devices, or to Zigbee groups. What I am not quite understanding is why devices that fall off the network no longer respond to Zigbee binds.
Here is an example. I have an Inovelli Blue 2 in 1 dimmer that shares a Zigbee bind with a Phillips Hue LCA005 Bulb. I was in the process of setting up a BLE beacon, and soon realized that its polling rate significantly affected my Zigbee network. Several Zigbee devices fell offline, including the hue bulb. The Zigbee bind did not turn the bulb back on, resulting in me needing to remove power from the bulb to get it to reconnect to the network.
Is this normal Zigbee behavior? I even reviewed the Zigbee binding table for the Inovelli, and it does not remove the bind destination when any bound device falls offline. Maybe the destination device does something with its own binding table? I am not sure.
If your ZigBee environment is being swamped, it will be swamped irrespective of whether the messages are going through your coordinator or directly from device to device.
Both Bluetooth and ZigBee operate in the 2.4ghz spectrum. Binding or not, if your BT device is drowning out everything in that spectrum, then it will affect everything using 2.4ghz, including WiFi.
To put it another way: You and a friend have invented a language used exclusively between yourselves. It always works, until you go to a concert and can’t hear each other because of the noise.
It doesn’t matter that the noise doesn’t use your language - its presence is enough to disrupt your communication
I failed to mention that I had adjusted the polling rate on the Bluetooth beacon to fix the Zigbee instability, but the bulb continued to miss bind commands from the Inovelli switch. This behavior is not limited to just this bulb, either. Even when my network was free from any interference, previous Zigbee bulbs seemed to behave similarly.
For example: I used to own a Sengled Zigbee bulb that would drop off the network, even when displaying very high LQI. It would also not respond to Zigbee binds, even when the rest of the network was stable and functioning properly.
I still don’t believe interference was the only reason for the devices not responding to binds, because if it was, eventually it would start responding to commands once the interference was resolved, but that wasn’t the case with the Phillips bulb. I can see why it may fail to rejoin the Zigbee network, but I’m not sure why the Zigbee bind would stop working completely.