Made the swap, but no difference so far. Do I need to wait for an adjustment to the newfound spectrum clarity?
(hoping I’m not the aforementioned weak force)
what did you swap in this iteration?
Back to your original post, what defines ‘flaky’?
I would make sure you are not ‘barking up the wrong tree’ with the RF interference chase.
IMHO, two things I have found around RF interference and zigbee:
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I disagree with folks that say zigbee systems are not robust when it comes to RF interference. Yes, these are low power devices, so you have to understand how to architect a system with a mesh of various kinds of these devices (coordinator, router, end device, mains powered, battery powered, wake up design…) WiFi and Bluetooth are difference systems with difference constraints, trying to lump all together is not correct.
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The video demo of RF interference from USB 3 and other devices on a computer and zigbee devices shows that if you put the zigbee device and these ‘noisy’ components in very close proximity, the zigbee signal does not get transmitted or received PERIOD. That is not ‘flaky’, that is just BLOCKED. These are digital packets with CRC checking on each, not some ‘throw it over the fence’ system that has no checking.
Swapped from USB 3.1 to USB 2.0
I have 40 Zigbee, 12 Z-wave and @60 wi-fi devices
To my point on the USB 3.x interference, zigbee coordinator is most likely going to work or not right next to a setup as shown in the video. Is there a setup where you would be getting some packets to and from coordinator and some not with this type RF interference, maybe. However I am skeptical. And as you have done, it just a matter of 5 dollar USB 2 hub and 2 dollar 1 meter USB 2 cable to confirm.
I have a similar number of zigbee and wifi devices, ditched zwave a number of years ago, however that is a sub gigahertz system as I remember, and should be totally out of the equation (other than a noisy zwave dongle that might intro the type of issue shown in the above video.)
Again, what is the def of ‘flaky’ and a run down of specifics of the zigbee devices? When folks have issues with zigbee, IMHO first places to look are:
- check coordinator firmware and vendor.
- check zigbee router vendors and layout of physical router locations.
- understand zigbee end devices peculiarities
- move away from zha to zigbee2mqtt out side of your Home Assistant software, run zigbee2mqtt in a real docker container NOT inside Home Assistants virtual world.
I moved a couple of routing devices (maybe not really a factor) and changed the conbee to channel 25 and all is well except for a few sluggish lights directly above where I sit most of the time. I was avoiding the channel change because I read it would require manually re-pairing all the devices and that is a pain for me for a couple of reasons. Laziness should not be a factor in troubleshooting and it turned out to be totally automatic anyway.
Maybe all I need now is a tinfoil hat to protect those lights.
Thanks again to all.
EDIT: I couldn’t get those last fan lights to behave, so I decided to swap them around to see if one was the culprit. That not only fixed them, but the other lights were even more responsive. Also, the LQI for all lights but one is 255 while the visualization has a much red as green.
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