I have a few problems configuring all of the HA environement, let me give you ome context.
Context
I’v moved out from a small appartment to a 3 floor house. Of course i knew that the communication of wireless protocol would be rough from a floor to another but i didn’t think it would be THAT BAD.
Today i have a RPI 4 with HA on the 1st floor (middle one) that has a Zigbee USB Dongle (EFR32MG21) but for some reason, i get the signal of some Sonof sensor from higher and lower floor. But when it comes to lightbulb its a bit messier. Top floor is ok, but bottom floor bulbs are constantly disconecting/reconnecting. I have to make some more test about it from differents room on the lower floor to see if its not due to some copper in the wall causing interference or something. Some walls are rock wall, some ain’t. Some have alot of different metalic pipes/rhod, some don’t. Etc…
Questions
My question are
Is it a good idea to put 2 Raspberry Pi running HA with a zigbee dongle on each 0 and 1 floor ?
Will i be able to control all the devices from the 2 RPI-HA server on a single interface ?
Is there a better way to manage multiple floor device
I m open about learning things on those topics, so if you have anything else to tell me, or to redirect me to, let me know.
Regards
Joseph
PS : appologies if some of my sentences ain’t good, im not an English native.
I am kind of interested in this, myself, for the future. I thought that there can be only one Zigbee or Z-Wave dongle per HA. I wonder if they have changed that. Ideally, if they did, it would probably be best to use IP enabled dongles where you can just run Cat-5e/6 to the center of each floor and do it that way or at least floor 1 and floor 3 and have floor 2 connect to whichever is better.
for my zigbee network using zigbee2mqtt I have a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway connected to my HA server. Then to strengthen the mesh I use two more connected to a powered USB hub in a different location in the house. You have to re-flash/update the dongle as either a coordinator or router. I use the ZigStar TI CC2652P/P7 FW Flasher addon to flash and update the dongle.
Yes. Don’t look for the hard way to fix a simple issue. You just need a few Zigbee repeaters (servers in the Zigbee world). I have eight of these scattered about my house. No Zigbee device is more than 8 ft from one of them or another Zigbee device with repeater capabilities:
Rarely, rarely ever happens. Especially in a home environment. Concrete walls, walls with aluminum studs, walls with conduit may attenuate the signals through them, but the wires cannot cause interference. Interference come from another device on the same frequency band, but the protocols anticipate this. Interference is extremely rare, and if it occurs, all you would see is some momentary diminished performance.
You weren’t specific which you are using: WiFi, Z-Wave or Zigbee, but since Zigbee is all you mentioned, that’s where I responded.
If this is a concrete construction, I’d start deploying these (as Zigbee routers/repeaters) from your Zigbee USB Dongle to your staircase, and spread out from there.
In parallel, I would do a USB 2.0 cable to get the dongle away from your RPi 4. This helped me a lot.
This is by the way more or less roughly explained in the ZHA integration introduction, adding devices, and troubleshooting sections (which among other things list limitations), see:
