I have a zigbee mesh network, with 3 “routers” set up through the home (let’s call them: front, up, back).
The house is long, so I have 3 repeaters at various points in the house to allow the zigbee devices to jump to the nearest/most powerful signal, which then should be routed/repeated through to the HA conbee II .
I’m using the official conbee integration, and not using DeCONZ.
I have noticed that occasionally a zigbee switch will blink red and have issues communicating - which is odd since the plug is literally around the corner (~2-4 meters away).
Looking in the visualisation within HA, I can see that one of the switches is actually linked to a switch at the other end of the house - any communication would literally have to go through extra walls + flooring and past one zigbee router in order to get to the one it’s connecting to.
This seems to be the situation for a few of the switches I have (and I currently have no other zigbee devices).
This seems insane to me - so I was wondering if there is something I can do to help let the zigbee devices know “if you connect here you’ll have a much better time”. Or maybe group them?
I thought zigbee would be best left alone to just send the messages out so the powered devices would pick up the messages and route them between themselves - but it doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Any help would be appreciated here - I could keep dumping more routers into the plugs, I think the current layout should be covering the home sufficiently and not over-swamp the radio frequencies.
So, the co-ordinator (conbee II in this instance) is in my HA.
It’s currently next to “front” (as I’ve just shifted it into a Raspberry Pi) but will soon be closest to “up”, and be in a clear line-of-sight to it (~7 meters away).
All 3 routers (ikea’s) can communicate to each other and the co-ordinator (HA) strongly… Which I would expect from wall powered devices TBH.
The switches ere all set up in-place, and when they were added they were added through the routers (I have the specific router search for the new device when adding).
The problem I see is that my “prime example” switch doesn’t connect straight down (through the floor) to the “front” router… Nor does it connect through a wall to the “up” router… It goes through the same wall, through the “up” router, through the floor, and then to the “back” router.
If I were to draw it on a comparable diagram it’s be a pythagoras “3-4-5” triangle, where the switch doesn’t go straight down to the bottom or midway in the hypotenuse - it goes all the way to the furthest corner.
Like I said, I understand that zigbee should “self heal” - but currently it’s just picking the worse router possible… So being able to “group”, “bind” or “prioritise” some of the devices to a router would be handy… But I can’t find much about mesh optimisation outside of “make sure you get routers to act and zigbee sorts itself out” …