Hi received my Yellow early October and migrated my existing network to it. All went well except the original device and entity names were not retained. I have covered this elsewhere. Since then I have had major problems connecting Aqara battery sensors to my network and getting them to stay connected. Over the past couple of weeks I have reconnected various devices one at a time to allow the network to adjust, moved WIFI channels, replaced batteries and still have 80% of the Aqara motion sensors and magnetic switch door sensors unavailable. Typically they reconnect and within 6 hours have become unavailable again.
LQI and RSSI figures are worse than the conbee II it replaces, despite the supposed higher tx and rx performance of the silabs and the Yellow is in the same physical location as the original.
LQI typically 120 to 190
RSSI typically -55 to - 70
Anyone else seeing these performance issues? Any suggestions?
Thanks
I had similar issues switching from Conbee II to Sonoff Zbdongle-E, which I believe shares the same EFR32MG21 chip? RFI and link quality were fine for me. Most Aquara’s I now connected through a Hue smart plug to get around this.
Thanks, I have ordered some additional Sonoff plugs to improve the repeater coverage. But some of these devices are in the same room as the Yellow so not sure additional repeaters will fix the problem.
I am using ZHA and I have also tried connecting through repeaters, with both tradfri repeaters and Innr wall plugs. What typical RSSI and LQI are you seeing?
Well, that is a hard question if you want to know what they were when they kept disconnecting. I checked them back then but I’m bad remembering actual numbers. Now that most Aquara sensors connect through other routers I see all sorts of qualities working stable now, ranging from lqi 88 to 200 on door sensors (tipically weakest) with rssi -76 to -51
What annoys me though is the numbers in the graph are almost always way different from the ones in the entities.
Hi again,
We’ve discussed migration on another thread (and the loss of naming), but am wondering about what has changed:
Small networks have a one-to-many mode, which was likely an issue for me (possible link to Tradfri battery drain?) cured with more IKEA routing sockets - the same as you propose.
The radio channel used by Zigbee is not something I’ve ever checked (and can’t find it!), but guess this could have changed with the new hardware. ZHA seems to prefer CH15 so perhaps that’s less likely.
My previous coordinator (Sonoff USB 3.0) had a large antenna, which the SilLabs in Yellow does not. I’ve not got data on battery usage, but it’s certainly not got better!
(FYI, the Yellow PCB has blank pads for J9 which strongly suggest an IPEX / U.Fl connector would solder on to connect an external aerial bottom left The circuit diagram confirms RF_SIGNAL does connect to J9, but no idea if there’s a software antenna select.)
Here’s some device RF signal for comparison:
Random Tradfri remote LQI: 244 RSSI: -39
Random Tradfri remote LQI: 188 RSSI: -53 (eats batteries, router within 2.5m)
Sonoff temp sensor TH01 LQI: 216 RSSI: -46
Sonoff PIR LQI: 244 RSSI: -39 2m from the Yellow
Currently, I’m impressed with the low-cost of Zigbee kit (compared to Z-Wave) but not impressed with battery life in general.
Thread seems a better design than Zigbee (both IEEE 802.15.4 of course), but with almost no devices on the market, cheap Zigbee switches from manufacturers who allow HASS firmware updates are still attractive.
IKEA is cheap, but weird and eats batteries, Sonoff seems OK, but it appears you’re not alone in having Aquara Zigbee issues:
Hi Derrick, I moved the WIFI channel because ZHA sits on 15 I moved my WIFI based on this useful chart Zigbee and WIFI interference - Novice Help - Hubitat. It seemed to make a slight difference, but the move to Yellow has left my network in a poor state.
Your signal stats are much better than mine, The devices in the same area of the house as the Yellow server are below 200 LQI and high negative RSSI. With my Conbee II, a NUC server with ZHA I was getting LQI of 220 - 255 and low negative RSSI.
I think I will try Zigbee2MQTT as things were very stable on my previous server and if that does not work Yellow will be going on to Ebay and the old server re-instated. I am also in the process of replacing Aqara with Sonoff zigbee devices to see if a change in manufacturer will help.
Udate on my issue with zigbee network, still got fairly medioce signal quality but replaced many of my Aqara battery sensors with Sonoff (not as nice design and bigger) and the network has stabilised without adding any further repeaters or moving to Zigbee2MQTT, building a test system which I will install Zigbee2MQTT to test before migrating everything else.
