Hi,
I have a Sonoff zigbee dongle on a nuc with HA in my garage.
How can I relay the mesh to another Sonoff dongle through a ethernet lan (or a Asus router RTAX92U that have a usb port). The two spots are not soo closed.
Do I need to configure HA specifically to relay that through a lan?
Thank you
Not quite sure exactly what you mean, do you mean that both dongles have Zigbee Coordinator firmware or that only the dongle to NUC with Home Assistant has Zigbee Coordinator firmware and the other Zigbee dongle has Zigbee Router firmware and you are only connecting it to something with USB-power?
You need to understand that you can never have two Zigbee Coordinator connected to a single Zigbee gateway, as there can only be one Zigbee Coordinator in a Zigbee network. That is a hard limitation.
Anyway, to extend a Zigbee network you use Zigbee Router devices, follow the tips here → Zigbee networks: how to guide for avoiding interference and optimize for getting better range + coverage
Summey; to get a great experience with long distances the best idea is to buy and connect many dedicated Zigbee Router device products or convert Zigbee USB dongle into dedicated Zigbee Router devices by flashing them with Zigbee Router firmware and power via USB-changers to make them into stand-alone Zigbee range extenders / Zigbee signal repeaters.
Also read → Not many people know that... A random collection of Zigbee trivia
…and → A to Zig - a Zigbee glossary
The only other thing you can do with an existing Zigbee network is to either relocate/move the existing Zigbee Coordinator by using a very long USB cable or create a Ser2net serial tunnel proxy (alternatively buy a network-attached Zigbee Coordinator adapter which does the same but is preconfigured as an appiance for it) and connect via Socat relay.
Tip is that you can buy an inexpensive USB RJ-45 conversion adapter kit that converts a (shielded) Cat-6 Ethernet cable into a very long USB cable allowing you to relocate the Zigbee Coordinator dongle to a better location →
Alternative is to setup two seperate Zigbee networks with each having their own Zigbee Coordinator, and for that you need two seperate Zigbee gateway application instances installed. FYI, the built-in ZHA integration does not support that at all, but you can setup several separate Zigbee gateway application instances of Zigbee2MQTT.
Waow, thank you for your answer and all the details. It is very clear and I will buy a usb cable and try.
A bit out this topic:
I enabled Thread, Zigbee and Matter support on the Sonoff ZBDongle-E.
Do you know if I can run ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT at the same time on this device?
Source: Enabling Thread, Zigbee and Matter support on the Sonoff ZBDongle-E and
Here it is said, it is possible: https://smarthomescene.com/guides/how-to-enable-thread-and-matter-support-on-sonoff-zbdongle-e/
What do you thisnk?
Thank you,