I have an RPi 4 with a newly bought Sky Connect attached. It works a lot better than my previous Zigbee stick with Z2M I must say! So now I’m trying to migrate all my Chinese Tuya devices over to HA. I bought several wall plugs with zigbee because I read that they span a proper network that all other zigbee devices can connect to. In the topology, I can see that some zigbees are already connected to plugs as hubs.
Next step is to get zigbee into the upper floor. See, we have a new home (140 square meters in two floors, so like 8*9 meters on two floors) and it has concrete floors with steel and iron in it, so the connection to the smart plug directly above the Pi and the sky connect can barely be established. It works, but it stutters, the plug turns on and off for two seconds after switching it in the app and I get an error in the app, too.
Do you have multiple Zigbee devices between the rPi and your needed room? For me, be it Z-Wave or Zigbee, I always make sure I have places for it to hop all along the way, and in doing that I’ve never had a communication problem of any note. In fact, I’ve only been adding Zigbee since January of this year, so when I started doing that I strategically would replace certain Z-Wave devices with Zigbee just to keep the network strong. In the beginning when I had just the controller and two outlets the Zigbee was iffy, but once I added a couple wall switches between them to bridge the gap it became a lot more stable than my extensive Z-Wave network was in the same locations.
are you using an extender cable? If you have the option to add more routers (bulbs for example) that would probably help too. My coordinator is 10-15 meters away from my house, some outdoor bulbs on the walls and my zigbee network never skips a beat.
I’m afraid I’d need a lot of additional zigbee outlets that I don’t require to be smart 🤷 but maybe I’ll give it a try. Probably one in the hallway on ground floor and one more in the top floor.
I cannot rely on bulbs. We only have LED lights that sadly go with WiFi and not zigbee. the market is not very strong in LED zigbee lamps here in Germany
I’m only using the extender cable that came with the sky connect (like 0.5m).
If you can add some outlets and switches (mains powered devices) between the rPi and where you are getting wonky signals then you likely will resolve your issue. I found some outstanding outlets that I use, but they are US so they don’t do you any good - but I’m sure there are some european versions equally as good and equally as cheap (I get 4 for US $40).
All Philips Hue lamps, bulbs and smart plugs are Zigbee and I also think they are routers.
There should be a lot of other brands too, like Ikea stuff and Lidl Smart Home.
My wife won’t have new light switches in the already new house
She also didn’t like the Ikea led lights. I didn’t know Lidl had some, too, and I didn’t look at Philips, sadly… Maybe I can convince her for some of these. We’re not very fond of the led lights, I have to say.
I’m just happy the sky connect is working now 