”Zigbee router” devices (which most AC mains-powerwd devices are) do support acting as Zigbee routers (also known as Zigbee signal repeater or range extender) if they follow the Zigbee standard. ”Zigbee end devices” (which most battery powered devices are) do not support routing signals rhemselves but can be routed if they support the Zigbee specification standard. Unfortunatly not all Zigbee router devices and end devices support the Zigbee standard and some brand of devices are infamous for not working with other brands. Xiaomi/Aquara is a such brand that is infamous for not being routed or capable of routing devices of other brands. Tip is to get Texas Instruments based devices as routers as they have a firmware that is know for being compatible with most brands.
Yes, that is correct. I have a Tuya Mini switch (the one you can install in the wall behind a normal light switch) and that device is ‘according to Tuya’ compatible with Zigbee 3.0.
I tried to pair that many times to the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge (also 3.0 Zigbee), but never got this working.
It may work if you flash the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge with Tasmota, but I haven’t tried that.
Here you have the real problem with Zigbee : although Zigbee 3.0 is a real standard (much more than Zigbee 1.2 which left space for interpretation by the vendors) there is one caveat : the standard does not force Zigbee 3.0 coordinator ( often called bridge/Gateway/hub/…) manufacturers to support devices from other manufacturers. That is up to them. So an ikea tradfri bulb might work on an philips hue hub, or a hue bulb might work on a tradfri gateway, but that is goodwill between those 2 manufacturers. It is not a reason for the Zigbee alliance not to certify a coordinator as Zigbee 3.0 compatible if they don’t.
The inter-operatebility between the different Zigbee device manufactures is far from perfect, also for Zigbee 3.0. Is that mainly caused by the different ESP chip sets used among the manufactures of the Zigbee devices, or is it mainly bcs firmware non-compatibility issues?
Does anybody know if flashing a Zigbee Hub in a network with the Tasmota FW resolve most of these issues?
And of course, if you are willing to spend a bit more on each sensor/device, then you could swap it all out with z-wave devices, those for sure are working much more reliable between different manufactures.
Router compatibility is due to firmware on that device and firmware on the device it is to route as if eithet or do not work well with the other then you can not really do anthing.
Issues with the coordinator not being compatible when talkinng directly to a device can often be solved by the developer of the hub/bridge/gateway, such as ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT.
Do not know what you mean by ”ESP” and ”BCS” in reference to Zigbee chips and/or firmware. Those acronyms are not used by any Zigbee chips or firmware as far as I know.
Zigbee coordinators (bridge/gateway/hub/…) have to know (the behavior of) the devices that connect to them. For opensource coordinator software, they know a lot of devices. Zigbee2MQTT has devices.js where all the devices it knows are defined. ZHA has ‘quirks’. Multi-device, multi vendor, proprietary coordinator firmware as Deconz will add device support if enough customers ask. Single vendor proprietary manufacturers as Hue or Ikea add new device support normally through firmware updates, and normally only when they bring out new devices themselves, or reach an agreement with a competitor for cross support (e.g. Ikea and Hue)
ZHA already know standard device types and as such only need quirks for devices that are not standard or do not follow the standard specifications exactly. So ZHA does not need quirks for all devices but only for those specific devices that deviate from the specificification standards that it support.
What I find particularly bad is that various Tuya 3.0 Zigbee devices (like the Mini switch) are not working (= not pairing) with the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge, out of the box.
I am wondering if this can be solved by flashing the Sonoff Zogbee Bridge with the Tasmota FW, and if somebody already has tested that.
can’t comment on other devices from tuya but i am using this scene switch and it works perfectly with sonoff zigbee hub using tasmota (ZHA)
OK, it is great to hear that this works with the Tasmota FW. Did you try to pair as well this Tuya device with a Sonoff ZBBridge with its factory FW?
I just got a Sonoff S31 Lite Zigbee outlet.
https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-s31-lite-zb.html
I looked inside and it has a Texas Instruments CC2530 chip in it.
It easily paired with the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge (Tasmota FW).
It didn’t appear to automatically act as a repeater for Temp2, the farthest Sonoff temp sensor in my house.
Is it supposed to automatically act as a repeater for other ZB devices?
Its been about 6 hours since it joined the ZB network with a new ZB address, and it still hasn’t started acting like a repeater.
That is a kind of weird: that device should act as a Zigbee repeater since it is mains powered.
Could you move your Zigbee Temp sensor closer to the S31 Zigbee and try again? The Temp sensor might still be out of the Zigbee range of the S31.
Otherwise I would open a support ticket with Itead to ask if the S31 Zigbee has the repeater feature or not.
Mmmmm, I don’t think distance was an issue. I put S31 within 20 feet of my farthest temperature sensor. So, the S31 was between the far temp sensor and the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge. The S31 would have “heard” both the temperature sensor and the ZB Bridge.
The Sonoff S31 sat there for about 24 hours, not pairing/repeating for any of my Sonoff temperature sensors. It was an clear repeater situation that it failed to act on.
Here’s another bizarre behavior I observed!
I read that HA users were having good results with the IKEA TRADFRI repeaters.
Since, I live in an area with an IKEA, I drove over and got an IKEA TRADFRI Zigbee repeater.
When I got home, I paired the IKEA TRADFRI with the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge.
It was around 9:45pm that night.
I put Sonoff S31 and IKEA TRADFRI at opposite ends of my house.
Thus, each of the two repeaters, are farther apart from each other, than than they are from the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge.
Within an hour, the Sonoff S31 linked itself to the IKEA TRADFRI!
By the next morning, the Sonoff S31 had linked itself to one of my Sonoff temperature sensors.
It had hours and hours to do that, but it didn’t until I brought the TRADFRI into the system!
This is a kind of interesting, but also weird 
What happens now when you remove the IKEA repeater completely from the set-up?
The Temp sensor has been paired now with the Zigbee Bridge and would be interesting to know if it works now well with the S31 Lite ZB as repeater in between.
And in case it would not work, take then the S31 out of the wall socket and plug then the IKEA repeater in that wall socket and see what happens (repeaters have usually a bit better range due to a bit larger antenna area inside).
Really a Zigbee architectural design questions or feature request to ZHA and Zigpy developers?
I have not tested removing a router with end devices connected to it in ZHA, however, most other Zigbee gateways/bridges/controllers will try to automagically repair the Zigbee network mesh after a certain amount of time, reconnecting to another Zigbee router or the coordinator and rebuilding the mesh network.
On the other hand many if not most other Zigbee gateways/bridges/controllers will not let you manually choose which Zigbee router that an end device should connect to as it is usual that everything is then done automatically, but from my experince such automatic reparing is not done very fast, maybe once every 24-hours if not manually forced?
If that would take 24 hrs, then a mesh network would not be very effective. You would expect that if a sensor is connected via a Zigbee repeater to its main Zigbee bridge/gateway, that when the Zigbee repeater fails or looses its power, that the mesh network will try to re-establish the connection between the sensor and the Zigbee bridge quite quickly via another route.
Best is probably for you to ask the Zigpy developers about fail-over and fail-back when repairing mesh
FYI, I tried to post this question as best I could here → Self-healing and automagically-repairing Zigbee network mesh in Zigpy and ZHA? · zigpy/zigpy · Discussion #614 · GitHub
OK, great that you posted it on Github. I also saw a few responses there already.
@ mrneutron (Eric):
Have you already tested to power off/remove the IKEA repeater installed between your (paired) Temp sensor and the Sonoff ZB Bridge? How is that set-up performing?