Got mine all setup and running today.
Had a couple minor issues but @tube0013 was quick to walk me through them.
Had to re-flash the coordinator to get it connected to my network. Also had to move some connections around between my switches because my us-16-xg switch wouldn’t connect to it at 100mbps so I had to put it onto my 24 port switch. The cables I was trying to power the routers with had a “base” that was too wide for the etched out area in the case so I wasn’t getting a good connection for powering it up. Swapped to some “skinny” cables and all was good. None of this is a big deal and didn’t detract from the experience at all.
First impression is that everything paired a hell of a lot quicker than it did with the conbeeII stick. Like I’m talking almost instant. Looking at the initial LQI’s were shocking. The conbee stick has a bug in it where all the LQI’s were showing 220+. So when I first looked and was seeing some devices down under 20 it was a mini heart attack. A few hours in I’m seeing the LQI values start to climb.
Long term we’ll see how it goes. I may actually start liking zigbee if this fixes all the issues I’ve had with it in the past.
Yes, I had to re-pair everything. It wasn’t too bad though, with z2m it recognized each device and automatically named them as I had them before. So it was literally just walking around doing the reset procedure on everything. Took a half hour or so.
Planning to grab one when they come back in stock, but I wanted to stick it to the ceiling so I was wondering if there are any STLs for the case or sizes for the board so I can start modeling a new case with a mounting bracket and maybe some internal space to put a PoE to USB extractor inside too.
I do need to double check they are the most recent versions, which I’ll do shortly.
PoE News:
I’ve ordered parts to do a test run of PoE powered coordinators using the Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO. I don’t anticipate any issues, however due to component cost the price will increase substantially. So I’m testing waters to see if it’s viable. I expect a small batch to be ready in 2-4 weeks if I didn’t screw up the PCB design.
I’ve added a Troubleshooting doc to github describing how to reflash the esp32 if it encounters an issue connecting to ethernet. I believe there are rare instances where the fw is corrupted and this may be required. @MRobi ran it to this, so I wrote most of this up for him but recycled it for a wider audience.
Pics are specific to the CC2652 Coordinator and if you are proficient in flashing ESP’s the flow and tools can be different, but I just rolled the method I typically use as an example.
I’m starting to think my zigbee issues weren’t with the conbee stick but moreso with zigbee as a whole.
Yesterday I added my row of blinds, and just like with the conbee stick they’re all over the place with responding. I have a wall of windows, 9 in total. The whole wall stretches maybe 20ft. Directly under the 4th window I placed the living room router. I then forced all the blinds to join through the router, assuming they would stay connected to it. As you can see in the picture below, not 1 of them stayed on the router which is directly in the middle of all the blinds. Instead they’re connecting to thermostats or plugs 40-50ft away or even in a different room! Or in the case of some of them they’re just out there on their own not connected to anybody anymore.
I do feel this product is better than the conbee stick. My thermostats are working great which I can’t say about the combee. I’m just so damn frustrated with Zigbee as a whole.
Are these Ikea Blinds? I have not followed how well they work in Z2M but I know from following some ZHA issues on them, that they seem to work best if paired directly through the repeaters they ship with, there is a ZHA Quirks issue I think with the detail buried in it. If they aren’t ikea ignore this.
I initially had them paired on Hubitat through the repeaters they ship with. I was lucky if they worked at all there. And don’t even get me started on my thermostats on HE…
Then I had them on Z2M with the conbee stick. Both with the repeaters and without. Same issue I’m seeing here now. I also had lots of missed thermostat commands here and constant errors in the logs about timeouts.
Then I moved them to ZHA with the Sonoff bridge coordinator plugged in under blind #4 (where the router currently is). I had no repeaters at all. They worked OK here. They’d miss a couple commands here and there so I put in some loops in the automation and they’d almost always get picked up on the second time through. But then I was running 2 independent zigbee networks in the house. (ZHA is missing the external temp feature for my thermostats so they need to stay on z2m)
Lastly I’ve moved them back to Z2M with the tube coordinator. My thermostats are finally working great, but same issue with the blinds. I’ve got a bunch of the repeaters that came with them left that I could deploy again, but they’re not choosing the ones that are out now as parent devices so I don’t have much hope on that fixing it.
I may be stuck running multiple zigbee networks to get reliability.
I’ve got 3 plugs under that wall of windows, so I put out 5 of the ikea repeaters plus the tube router. I then joined the 3 blinds that were out in the middle of nowhere through 3 of those ikea repeaters. 1 has since jumped to a thermostat in the kitchen as a parent, and the other 2 have jumped to a plug accross the room. We’re talking under an hour and they’ve completely abandoned the repeaters. The only thing that’s connecting through the repeaters now is the tube router.
EDIT: I decided to scrap everything and start over. This time I paired the 2 tube routers to the coordinator followed by 3 of the ikea zigbee repeaters hooked to extension chords. I took the repeaters and put them so they were physically touching the blinds while pairing. So each repeater has 3 blinds and 1 button on it, and all the repeaters are running through the tube router. I then went ahead and paired everything else. I’m headed out the door but we’ll see if it sticks
