I have been battling since switching from SLZB-06p to the new sonoff dongle max. After a lot of frustration I have identified there is an issue with random disconnects from the dongle, as reported on the sonoff I see:
Has anyone else experiences this, as I am trying to understand if its some kind of issue with my setup, or if this is a common dongle max issue that I am hoping maybe addresses in a firmware. It appears to be an issue even after a full reset of the network, and is not so much an issue with the network but the connection of the dongle to Z2M.
Any experiences with the Sonoff Max dongle that a similar or faultless would be appreciated to save my hair!
I have a huge number of Zigbee device. I’ve split them across three meshes, each using a Dongle Max which I’ve migrated to over the past few weeks. They’ve been rock solid. No crashes or disconnects. I have each instance of Zigbee2MQTT running in separate Proxmox containers. The two most likely causes that I can think of are lost packets, or freezes/hangs in Zigbee2MQTT from high CPU usage.
I have been facing similar issues, and this has been occurring quite frequently. I use a dongle E with another Z2M in the same HA and it works very stably
Ah thanks that reassures me its not an issue with my setup. I have been in contact with the support at sonoff and they have advised to update to beta 1.0.4 on ESP32-D0WDR2-V3 which I have done and will feedback if this helps resolve.
If this is a wider issue I am surprised I cant find others with the issue. This dongle has been well reviewed, and to be honest aside from this disconnect issue it has been pretty solid but this is a complete deal breaker in functionality as some devices like Aquara Aone devices don’t like to reconnect without manual intervention after a coordinator disconnect.
No luck with the bet firmware, still the same issue. I have given up. It could be a chance its my network, but i am doubtful. Purchased the ZBT-2 and did the painful migration as so far no issues whatsoever. The first time in a long time, long may it continue!
I replaced my Sonoff Dongle-E with the Sonoff Dongle-Max and the quality of my Zigbee network (lqi) has dropped considerably.
Before, it was rare for any device to have an lqi below 150 (and a good portion of them were above 200).
Now ALL devices are below 150 lqi, with many below 70, which is frightening!
I tested the connection via network (TCP), I tested the direct connection via USB, nothing changes.
The only “advantage” of the device is being able to connect it via network. Apart from that, the nice appearance and size of the antenna hide a device that is worse than the supposedly inferior Dongle-E.
I am quite disappointed.
(My Zigbee configuration already uses channel 25, because I had already made this configuration to have less interference from the Wi-Fi network and it gave a good result.)
I’m facing the exact same frustrating issue with the Sonoff Dongle-Max on my Home Assistant OS. I have two instances of Zigbee2MQTT running on it: one with the Dongle-E, which works flawlessly with all my devices maintaining LQI above 200, with no disconnections or instability whatsoever, and another with the Dongle-Max, which handles fewer devices but shows a horrible LQI, oscillating between 50 and 75 at most, even with much closer proximity to the sensors. The connection drops are constant and extremely worrying, making the device unusable for a reliable network. I totally agree with you—the Max seems like a step back compared to the E, despite the promises of better performance. Hopefully the community has some solutions for this.
