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:
As a Zigbee repeater, it adopts Zigbee 3.0 protocol compatible with my ZigBee network.
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.
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?
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:
Only the USB version but not Type-C…
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…
It only has the basic On/Off functionality in the Z2M, maybe it’s on the way.
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:
I have been trying to update it without success for three days. The process never comes to an end and often starts from the beginning . Do you have any advice?
How close? When I pair a new device or do an update, I move the device to within 1 meter of the coordinator. I use ZHA so I won’t see the same errors. But when I try to do an update through one or two routers, updates take sometimes hours. When the device is 1m from the coordinator updates take one or two minutes.
I think I have some other problems, because even in this situation, also removed the USB extension cable, with antenna and device to be updated to 20 cm, the situation does not improve. I also have R I also rebooted everything, but nothing is always very slow and continuous blocks. Thanks for the support, I don’t know whether to give up the firmware update or continue this agony.
Is that a USB3 port? If you don’t have a USB2 port, get a USB2 hub. The data frequencies of USB3 generated harmonics in the 2.4GHz frequency range and can interfere with Zigbee communications.
I had bought the extension cable specifically when I had other problems with other device. Now I forgot it was useful to use it, and I had tried without. The cable is specially USB2. the port of the mini pc I don’t remember and I don’t know how to verify it. Anyway, after dozens of tests and continuous reboots, I’m trying to temporarily use ZHA to update.
I’m in the same situation in reverse, switched to Zigbee2mqtt a year ago, and I’ve always been very happy. Anyway, back to us, it was agony, but it seems like we’ve reached the end. Yesterday with ZHA I managed to do the firmware update, then I went back to Zigbee2mqtt I sweated for a few hours, continuous disconnections and errors with other devices, difficulty recognizing this Sonoff, but in the end everything stabilized. From here however the update is not seen, I still see 1.004 and not 1.005. I think it’s just a display problem because if I try to search for an update, it tells me none available. Let’s hope we never have to do it again! Bye
