WTH is the ZHA network map looking so messy and is not usable?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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14

I still don’t understand what you’re going to use it for… :laughing:

15

To trace a path between malfunctioning devices and debug ZB issues.

1 Like
16

But… the path will have changed. They change all the time. :confounded:

2 Likes
17

Not for the troublesome devices i can tell ya! :joy:

3 Likes
18

I think the simplest improvement would be to use colour to differentiate Coordinator, Routers, and End-Devices!

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19

That’s a nice and easy-to-implement suggestion!

21

I didn’t vote because I don’t want a list. The graph makes the most sense from a technical standpoint, and it works quite well for showing the mesh. That doesn’t mean the graph could use some improvements, however you aren’t asking for that.

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22

You are right. I changed my initial WTH based on your feedback. The other ideas for improving this have been added to the WTH.

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23

Thanks, now it seems vote worthy :slight_smile:

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24

I raised a similar ticket, closed because of its similarity to this. My own view of the visualisation page is that:

The zha visualisation screen

  1. has no key indicating what colours and shapes mean. The docs aren’t clear on how to read the values off the connections (yes they’re rssi, but why are some a single number and others XX/YY. I never found a satisfactory answer. - now finally in this thread I hear that they’re bidirectional (in some cases)

  2. does not remember if you place nodes in specific areas.

  3. does not allow you to focus in on just the connections to one device. This would make troubleshooting easier

  4. is next to impossible to use with a laptop glidepad

In short, my personal opinion is that this feature is overdue an accessibility overhaul.

In addition, with an appropriate interface this tool could also provide easier access to ZigBee binding so that specific switches continue to work directly if zha is down.

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25

I used to use deConz and in its visualisation you could drag the nodes around and their position would be persistent. I found this helpful to put all the routers central and the battery devices in the same room around them. This made it easier to see if a battery device was only connected to the hub.

And most of the time I don’t believe there really is a mesh - I have a lot of Aqara devices and if you move them to another room they don’t magically join another router - they drop off the network.

I use the ZHA Toolkit (a bit) and that shows a lot of the battery devices only as neighbours to one router. If that router happens to be a smart light that a guest turns off at the wall, the battery device might not recover - or at best take a long time to do so.

2 Likes
26

I think it would be really nice if the devices on the map could be grouped by something the user is more familiar with, like the rooms or floors assigned to each device.

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27

24 hours with the default settings in ZHA, but you can change that if you’re willing to sacrifice battery life in favour or reporting interval.

Easiest thing would be to get a smart switch which supports decoupled mode if you’re controlling a smart bulb.

28

Simple table could be cool. For me it should be 3 colums.

  • Name of device (as link).
  • Signal strenght, but not signal to first neighbour, but weakness signal strenght on best route from device to to coordinator.
  • Best route from device to coordinator, e.g.:

Device 5 (160) → Device 12 (85) → coordinator

Device (signal strenght).

1 Like
29

Mesh routing is dynamic, there is no “best route” as the next datagram could take a very different path.

30

Would be nice to have a crowdsourced database of device images so we could assign/auto-assign them in the map so we could zoom in and see what device we are actually looking at.

31

Visualisation map is cool option but if we have many devices it is completely unreadable. Therefore, I suggest that after selecting a given device, it shows only the routes for a given device. In addition, I suggest checkmark - show only best routes - to show only best route from each device to coordinator. You can also combine these two options - so if you select this option to show only best routes and then select one device it will show only one, best route, from this one device to coordinator.

2 Likes
32

Some time ago I did something similar as an external analysis. Z2M in my case but should be the same for ZHA.

33

Would be nice to have a crowdsourced database of device images

Z2M have that. Perhaps join forces and share?

34

The visualization map of Zigbee2MQTT is way better. I think ZHA should just replace its own map with (an adapted version of) the map from Z2M

2 Likes