Over the years I accumulated quote a few Zigbee Devices. Form various vendors. My summary so far: Zigbee is quite a finicky protocol.
What annoys me the most is that the majority of devices don’t adapt a reconfiguration of the network topology - but according to the standard they should. For example when I introduce a new Router - or plug an existing Router into a new power plug, only a few devices can handle this.
Xiaomi/Aqara devices for example connect only to the one endpoint they have been paired with. They only do this one and only connection - and they only do this once (during pairing). Not very fault tolerant. And far from the mesh-topology the Zigbee standard is talking about.
Some other devices from, for example, SONOFF or Heiman, handle this situation a bit better. Bit still far from perfect.
Another, basically never implemented, feature is Battery lifetime: it’s useless. This are the 3 cases I’ve seen so far:
- it always shows 100%
- it shows a, more or less, random percentage - I’ve even seen negative values
- it shows a, more or less, random voltage
So, in summary: All the devices that you can buy from Aliexpress, etc., from vendors like TuYa, SONOFF, Xiaomi, Aqara, and what not, seem to only implement a bare minimum of the Zigbee features.
So my question: Are there other vendors that you could recommend?