Zigbee USB Dongle on a remote router

[Hedda]

@SummitHome

I have a separate router for wireless that is connected by a buried ethernet cable, with router setup as a repeater. This too works great as I stream my Spotify via Volumio with no issues. My current ZigBee dongle won’t reach the new devices, so could I add another USB dongle to the remote router?

Unfortunately not possible like that, at least not at this time. The ZHA integration does at this point not support multiple Zigbee Coordinator adapters at the same time and you can unfortunately not either at this point have multiple ZHA integration components instances installed and running inside a single Home Assistant core instance at the same time.

See questions and answers as well as suggested workarounds like installing a Zigbee2MQTT instance at the remote location just for the devices there → Multiple ZHA integrations possible? - #2 by Hedda

Multiple ZHA integrations possible?

You can currently only have one instance of the ZHA integration per Home Assistant installation, that is for sure. So for now it will only be the first instance of ZHA that you choose to configure that is used. The only way I can think of getting two working instances of the ZHA integration per Home Assistant installed today would be the hacky option of manually copying the zha component to a new folder/directory and edit the manifest JSON file on the second copy so that its domain and name is …

Alternatively try to build out your Zigbee network with more and stronger Zigbee Router devices, see:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#using-router-devices

and

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/wiki/Generic-best-practice-tips-on-improving-Zigbee-network-range-and-general-stability

Checkout Sonoff ZBDongle-E and ZBDongle-P flashed with with Zigbee Router firmware instead:

ITead’s “Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2” (model "ZBDongle-E") based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 +20dBm radio SoC/MCU

FYI, ITead just released a new “ZBDongle-E” adapter as an improved version of their old/previous barebone Silabs EFR32MG21 based Zigbee 3.0 USB adapter from ITead and this new variant is to be sold side-by-side as an alternative to ITead’s TI CC2652P based “Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus” (which is now renamed to “ZBDongle-P”), meaning they will continuously sell both variants and while both type of radio SoC chips practically have the same specifications on paper, they use different Zigbee s…

ITead's "Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus" (model "ZBDongle-P") based on Texas Instruments CC2652P +20dBm radio SoC/MCU

UPDATED! The announced TI CC2652P based “Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus” from ITead, later renamed to “ZBDongle-P”, has been released and looks to be great value for a premium hardware package sold for a low price. It is based on Texas Instruments CC2652P radio chip and this “ZBDongle-P” variant is to be sold side-by-side as an alternative to their new “ZBDongle-E” variant that is instead based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 radio SoC chip, and while both practically have the same specifications o…