Over the last 5 months I’ve done my due diligence in trying to get the Sonoff to work.
I searched the forum for fix-it information, and asked what I could do to fix the Sonoff malfunctions. There were no solutions, only reports from others of the same device disconnections.
Oh, I understand that wifi and Zigbee are different protocols, which are operating in the same 2.4GHz frequency band. Their channels overlap. You have to coordinate the channels of each so they don’t interfere with each other in the RF domain.
ZHA is not able to change the Zigbee channel used by the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge, so you have to change the wifi channel to avoid interference. You can read about that here:
One of the first things I did in trying to make the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge work better, was to move my wifi access point channel to the other end of the 2.4GHz band from the Zigbee. It didn’t help, at all. Zigbee devices kept randomly coming disconnected from the Sonoff, and had to be re-paired about once a week.
Around post 120 in this forum thread, user tube0013 explains the Zigbee network stability issues he had with the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge and how he has moved away from it, to a hardwired serial-to-Zigbee connection, and the stability that has provided.
On the CC2531 USB coordinators, there have been more than one version of Zigbee coordinator firmware released for the CC2531 in the last 5 months. There is clearly development going on. Even if someone considers it experimental, my first-hand experience suggests that the CC2531 USB stick has more stable operation than the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge.
The purpose of the forum is to share information with the community.
If you have concrete information about how to prevent the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge from disconnecting Zigbee devices, please share it.