I have a sonoff dongle lite that I use as my otbr. I also had a load of the first gen Google nest WiFi pucks. These pucks are a real nuisance because they refuse to consolidate into a unified thread mesh. So I chucked them and replaced with to link deco. So far, so good and all my IKEA thread devices work quite well.
I have an outbuilding which is about thirty metres from the house as I would really like the same IKEA temperature sensors and contact sensors in there. The single Thread Border Router in the house wont reach that far. I had thought about using Thread plugs in weatherproof boxes spaced up the garden to try to make a radio bridge but that just seems like a terribly awkward and precisely unreliable l unreliable workaround. The outbuilding has power and ethernet. In talking to chat gpt and Gemini, I was led to believe that a slzb06mu would solve my problem by becoming a Thread Border Router in the outbuilding and connecting to the home assistant green in my house via the TP link puck’s spare ethernet port. The device in question can run otbr itself.
I have tried this, input the hex string from my thread network, and it seemed to come alive. On the slzb06mu interface, it went from leader to child and finally router. However, I have been unable to commission any thread devices in the outbuilding.
I did have some success commissioning the devices indoors, taking them to the outbuilding and power cycling tree smlzb06. That worked for the temperature sensors. But when I tried that with the door sensors, they stopped working after a couple of hours.
I did not have ipv6 enabled on the deco network, so I have enabled that now. That seemed to cause some pretty major problems when I restarted everything and all my thread devices dropped off but that seems to have been remedied by restarting the matter server add the devices in the house at least appear to be working.
I’m confused as to whether what I am trying to achieve is possible having only spoken to AI bots about it and I figured someone here who knows a great deal about this sort of thing might say “No, that won’t work”. But it did seem to with the temperature sensors. Now I can’t even get those back!
I’m happy to provide any further details that might be helpful but I don’t know what they would be at this stage! Thanks again in advance.
In general, a TBR in the Outbuilding connected via Ethernet to the house that also has an Ethernet connected TBR and both are connected to the same LAN/IPv6-subnetwork, then the two should discover each other and then connect to each using TREL which effectively is a thread “link” (over Ethernet). In other words the two TBRs are connecting as Thread routers.
So if you saw the slzb06mu as OTBR go from leader to child and finally router, then it means it saw the home’s Thread network (otherwise it would have stayed as leader).
I don’t know anything about TP Link Deco/Networking, but if you are using pucks to backhaul your Ethernet from Outbuilding to the Home over WiFi, then it may be the WiFi signal is not good enough (but its just a guess). You will also need to check that mDNS or Ethernet multicast is not being filtered out.
Yes, the tbr’s can definitely see each other and form what home assistant seems to think is a coherent network, but there is not a continuous thread mesh from the house to the outbuilding and I figure it must be yours that is causing the problem somehow.
As far as I can tell, WiFi shouldn’t be involved at all. From the outbuilding, the sequence goes:
slzb06mu >> deco puck (wired connection) >> main deco router (wired connection) >> HA Green (wired connection).
I know nothing about ipv6, multicast or anything to do with networking! So it could be that the router is causing the problem, as you say. I wonder if a simple network switch would be better in the outbuilding so I would skip that outbuilding puck out of the chain..? But maybe it doesn’t work like that.
Today I reset the slzb and had it make its own distinct thread network in the outbuilding. It is there but I’ve had no luck commissioning any devices because phones are extremely picky about witch thread credentials they want to use and there is seemingly no way to change anything in that regard.
I was also considering bringing it into the house to make a unified mesh and then moving it into the outbuilding but that is probably clutching at straws!
About the only thing I can suggest, is to try and get the mesh back together and then monitor the OTBR logs of both the SLZB and the sonoff dongle based OTBR to see what it says about TREL (a log entry should look like[N] TrelLink------: blah blah) over the course of oh say 24 hours to possibly get an idea of what is going on. Don’t bother trying to commission anything (for now)
