Need expert’s advise for choise of Zigbee coordinator to be used with ZHA.
I am currently using Sonoff Bridge under tasmota and experience all sorts of problems, main of which is the instability of connection. I have risen this issue to ZHA developers couple of times but they insist it is because Sonoff Bridge is a WiFi device which causes instability of connection channel. Would anyone recommend something more reliable than SonoffBrige (USB, I assume, or ??ethernet??, yet powerfull enough to carry over 200 devices (I have more and plan to add further, using rauters ofcaurse), or maybe there is a better firmware for Sonoff Bridge?
It’s hard to answer what might be better as when reading your post …200 devices …that’s a lot and I thought I read somewhere that the amount of devices is limited to the sonoff bridge.i flashed sonoff bridge with tasmota and it works fine with about 12 devices the bridge is close to the router …just beside I moved all my hue stuff over as Philips really sucks .if not try deconz USB stick with zha works as well or maybe just deconz with its own integration? But how did u pair soooooo many devices with the sonoff bridge ?
Easy - just never stop… Most of them are Mains - bulbs and sockets, I have many of these since it is the cheapest way to measure power consumption - pumps, home appliencies and so on, ~ 60 are sensors - motion+temp|humidity. The coordinator has a limit of 32 direct connections, but it does not concern routers, which you can have as many as… I do not know how many, no data available…
Based on my exploring and that you are planning a pretty large network, I would offer that going with one of the better supported hardware solutions would probably be a good direction for you. I think that universe right now would be the deconz hardware or the newer TI hardware. I have been using the Sonoff bridge for several weeks now and with a small network, it seems as good as all the others I read about. Concern would be that whether there will be good support for this modification going forward. It is just one of many devices in the Tasmota portfolio and is not really the main focus of this group. And whether Sonoff continues to release firmware that can be extracted and inserted into Tasmota hacks. And I see problems with zigbee devices routing correctly, whether the firmware on the coordinator plays a large role in these issues, I don’t know. But it is the brain that can ask for network reconfigures, so you will want to have the ability to get the latest firmware for your coordinator without problems. With 200 devices you don’t want to be rebuilding your network ever… hopefully.
Right now I ‘semi-rebuild’ it every week - to make this thing work again I have to delete the integration and install it back, good it has some info left to pull back all devices after installation, so atleast I do not have to re-pair them all again…
And I am using this with ZHA in 2020.12.01 HA, not a problem at the ‘network’ level since I installed it and I ran zigbee2mqtt with theTI CC2530 on a RPI3 for 18 months with zero problems (about 8 device only):
Program Version 9.2.0.1(zbbridge)
Build Date & Time 2020-12-23T17:57:10
Core/SDK Version 2_7_4_9/2.2.2-dev(38a443e)
with ncp-uart-sw-6.7.6_115200.ota
Hmmm. Same thing as I use… Maybe I have deffected coordinator - luckly I have 3 availabe, one more I flashed with Tasmota but never used yet, and another did not have time to flash even… Tomorrow I’ll try to rebuild the whole thing with another one to see If that one would work better…
Concerning TI CC2530 - is it powerfull enough to carry 200 devices through the network of routers? I have RPi4 which I can use deliberately for zigbee data collection and access those sensors and switches from main HA installation. Do you think this approach would work?
In your bug report I donot see that you say what devices you are having issues with, can you share?
When I say, I am not having any ‘network’ issues, that is not saying that I see some very strange / difference behavior with some of my devices. Often depending on how they are connected, directly to coordinator or via different routers. It is a total crap shoot when I try to connect some end devices via various routers. Which bodes very poorly for zigbee ‘interoperability’ .
I do not have experience with the newer TI devices, but from my reading of others, the CC2530 is very limited compared to these newer TI chips, both in CPU horsepower and radio power. So I would think the CC2530 would not be a good choice for a larger network.
I have what is probably a pretty noisy 2.4 ghz house where this is running, about 30 wifi devices on 2.4 ghz 3 mikrotik ni]ode mesh wifi, 20 ble temperature sensors on 2.4 ghz, hue bridge, ikea bridge, smartthings bridge, aqara bridge, sonoff bridge, smart meter bridge. And with all that junk running and microwave, no problems.
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