I am very new to Zigbee and am trying to figure out how to read the topography diagram. Would anyone mind taking a look and let me know if this looks good? Also, I am not clear what the numbers indicate. Sorry - I am a novice here.
I have been looking online for a good introm but haven’t found anything yet.
Also, I see that my Hue motion sensor seems to have a weak connection to an Ikea router in another room…not sure why it is connecting there, as I added that device in a bathroom that has a repeating smart plug (Kid bathroom nightlight) - so, not sure why it didn’t connect there. Is there anything I can do to improve that?
Lastly, I have 3 Aqara devices - a motion sensor and 2 temperature sensors that don’t seem to be connected anywhere, based on the map. Why would that be? My understanding was that they played well with the Ikea routers, which I have in each bedroom that has a temp sensor, but it’s not showing the connection on the topography…they are updating, though. I would just like to know how reliable their connection is.
the LQI link quality numbers seems to be vendor specific, I have numbers from single digits to near 255 (which is ‘best’ as I understand). Colors of lines seem to be kind of random in most recent releases of HA, I am on 2021.5.5, I not am sure what causes colors. I find this display of ZHA info more useful, picture below and my config to get it to display. (apologies, I am a old schooler with the lovelace stuff and still configure by manually editing the .yaml files, so you will probably have to do some different work if you are using GUI to manage your lovelace GUI.
I gave up on the LUMI / Aqara devices, I could never get them to ‘play nice’ with my other zigbee devices. Different people have different experiences, I think depending on what devices they have in their zigbee network. I went with bluetooth low energy temp and humidity and they are solid, I’m not sure I have seen anyone get a satisfactory temp/humidity solution with zigbee.
Where you ‘add’ a zigbee device will ‘steer’ where that device connects back to the coordinator. See picture below, I am not sure if you are already adding device this way or not. However, depending on a number of factors, this is still not a absolute determiner of a devices connection back to coordinator. However, this is how you extend ‘reach’ of your zigbee network.
I have had pretty good success with Ikea motion sensors, Aqara motion sensor was a total bust, I have only used Hue motion sensor with Hue hub. But again to item (3) above where you add a end device will make some differences.
# configuration.yaml
lovelace:
mode: yaml
# if you update resources, then you need to reload 'resource' from 3-dot menu in upper right corner of lovelace UI
resources:
# https://github.com/dmulcahey/zha-network-card
- type: module
url: /local/custom-lovelace/zha-network-card/zha-network-card.js
# ui-lovelace.yaml
title: ZHA
# icon: mdi:home-outline
cards:
# https://github.com/dmulcahey/zha-network-card
clickable: true
columns:
- name: Name
prop: name
- attr: available
id: available
modify: x || "false"
name: Online
- attr: manufacturer
name: Manufacturer
- attr: manufacturer_code
name: Manufacture Code
- attr: model
name: Model
- attr: ieee
name: IEEE
# - attr: device_reg_id
# name: Device Reg ID
- attr: device_type
name: Device Type
- name: NWK
prop: nwk
- attr: rssi
name: RSSI
- attr: lqi
name: LQI
- attr: last_seen
name: Last Seen
- attr: power_source
name: Power Source
- attr: quirk_class
name: Quirk
- attr: quirk_applied
name: Quirk Applied
sort_by: available
type: 'custom:zha-network-card'
For the Bluetooth temp sensors, which ones did you go with? And what do you use as a repeater? Most of the rooms that need temp sensors are further from the HA Pi, so not sure what I would need to make that work.
Distance is currently BLE’s weak point, since it is only a single point to point for these low cost temperature devices, bluetooth mesh is coming but at higher cost and still probably year/s away not months.
That said about BLE distance, have 20 or so BLE temperature/humidity sensors spread around a sub 2,000 sqft single story house with drywall walls. With a Raspberry Pi 2 in a central location in the house, I have not had a reception problem with any of the sensors in over a year of operation. I receive between 300 and 1200 ‘readings’ per hour from these devices consistently. Way more that is needed for most applications. This includes two sensors inside a full size refrigerator and freezer 40 or feet from the RPI thru a wall and the fridge steel walls.
If you look at the several ‘built-in’ BLE device integrations for HA, these all (i believe) run on the machine that is running HA. So, yes, it is possible to have bluetooth reception problems if your HA server is squirreled away. Both for this reason and the fact I struggled with python and bluetooth on my linux HA host, I went down my own Rube Goldberg route with a dedicated RPI that collects the BLE data and publishes it to MQTT via WiFi.
I think the smart folks that a steering the various ‘builtin’ python HA solutions have solved most of the bluetooth python problems, so for the price of one BLE temperature and humidity sensor (if you have BLE adapter on your HA RPi) you can get a low cost look at your BLE reception by setting up in HA and moving the BLE sensor to your various areas of interest and see how many readings HA gets over a period of an hour for example.
You can see the route I went down at the link below, I have not touched the code in many many months, because it has just worked. Some other folks have improved on my initial work. But the fundamental premise remains the same, a dedicated RPI (any of them work as long as it either has builtin BLE or you can add a USB BLE adapter) talking the BLE adapter at low level C API code and MQTT interface to HA. My favorite sensors (that you can get today) are the firmware hacked Xiaomi LYWSD03MM and the Govee H5074. I also went down the MQTT dedicated RPi route because I wanted to get the indoor and outdoor temperatures and humidities such that I could ask Google or Siri to speak the temps in reply to a voice query, I’m not sure about how well it would work with Alexa, but the Google stuff is rather problematic. The Siri response via HomeBridge to Apple is solid. Picture of HA page with some of the BLE sensor charts below as well. Good hunting!
