The BEST Zigbee Repeater--ZBMicro

Hardware
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I was looking forward to a Zigbee repeater to improve the Zigbee network of my house for a while but nothing. Until recently, I found the SONOFF ZBMicro.

It is a Zigbee USB adaptor with a relay function that can realize remote control and is very easy to install. Not only as a Zigbee repeater improve communication quality but also supports USB 2.0 data transfer. It even supports fast charging for devices when paired with a fast charging adapter and power cable.

Advantage:

  1. As a Zigbee repeater, it adopts Zigbee 3.0 protocol compatible with my ZigBee network.
  2. Plug-and-play. Different from other repeaters, the benefit is its mini size and powered USB–flexible use, which can be adapted to many places is what I need.
  3. Value for Money. Apart from the Zigbee repeater, it supports USB 2.0 data transfer, it occurs to me that if we have a Zigbee dongle in each of the nodes in a proxmox cluster with high availability, we can add a Sonoff ZBMicro and thus be able to turn them on and off with Home Assistant depending on the active node?
  4. It is a good option if your charger is already USB. It can be used to set a charging schedule for my HA Dashboard.

Disadvantage:

  1. Only the USB version but not Type-C…
  2. You cannot pair it to the same dongle you want to cut, if so, it is left without communication with the server and you cannot turn it on again…
  3. It only has the basic On/Off functionality in the Z2M, maybe it’s on the way.
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Nearly every mains powered zigbee device is a mesh ‘repeater’ otherwise known as a routing device. Add many zigbee wall plugs and or bulbs and such do this. There are some bulbs that don’t route, like Singled, but most do.
More about boosting your zigbee mesh here:

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Sonoff recently released ZBMicro firmware update 1.0.5 that greatly reduces the unnecessary Zigbee network overloading.

The OTA update is available via Zigbee2MQTT