I have the Sonoff ZB Bridge, flashed with Tasmota and connected to HA, most sensors connect but the ones in the garage are just a little too far.
After reading plenty of threads I purchased the Ikea repeaters.
Using the steps of adding a device I can get the Ikea repeaters added.
However, when I look at the visualisation for the ZHA integration, the repeater doesn’t connect immediately to the Sonoff bridge, after several hours it finally connects.
I added 2 more repeaters, hoping that the once the initial repeater connected, the remaining 2 would somehow be quicker to connect…they weren’t.
Is this normal behaviour for the repeaters? My temp & motion sensors connect immediately and show a connection back to the sonoff bridge?
The fact that you don’t see a line does not mean it is not connected. I have a Sonoff Motion sensor that stubborn refuses to show a line, however, every time I go in that room, the light goes on. So it is clearly working.
I now, (after 24hrs) have the repeaters connected, however, nothing is connecting to them, devices in the same room as the repeaters are either disconnected or all connecting to the controller.
Is the sonoff ZB bridge a bad choice as the central point to my zigbee mesh?
There is a reason the Sonoff ZB Bridge is not recommended :
The bridge works fine with Zigbee2Tasmota, as all Zigbee traffic is local with that integration, but the used Zigbee chipset does not handle short disconnects well.
Note that the ITEAD Sonoff ZBBridge is not recommended as a Zigbee Coordinator for ZHA integration or Zigbee2MQTT for the same reason that no WiFi-based Serial-to-IP bridges are not recommended, as the serial protocol does not have enough fault-tolerance to handle packet loss or latency delays that can normally occur over WiFi connections, and therefore both ZHA integration and Zigbee2MQTT have warnings against using WiFi-based Serial-to-IP bridges
