@ffries interesting! but i do not unserstand the part with Ethernet PoE/Wifi on a zigbee coordinator? you mean you will split the same mesh into 5 pieces, or you will have 5 independent zigbee meshes? is it possible to use more than one coordinator in zigbee2mqtt?
The only reason to use PoE for a router is just as a convenient power source. From the zigbee perspective it is no different than a Sonoff dongle flashed with router firmware plugged into a usb charger.
There can only be one coordinator per z2m or zha instance. You can run multiple instances of z2m, but each is a separate, distinct zigbee net.
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Yes and No, the big advantage of the UZG01 is that it is a very small device which can communicate with Zigbee2mqtt over IP using Ethernet or Wifi (not both) and it can be installed everywhere in a building, It can be powered by USB or PoE. It is independent of HomeAssistant location.
You can achieve 1 HA : n coordinators connections very easily.
In my house, I plan to use 4 or 5 of them (currently only one) : one in each building and two outdoors. I already have two (version 01.1) and I purchased an additional three (version 01.2). They are very stable products running for more than a month now.
Flashing the UZG01 is easy and can be done Over The Air using a nice web interface. You can control and monitor the UZG01 within HomeAssistant (see screenshot up).
In a concrete building with different floors, you can imagine one coordinator per floor and then mesh network for each floor. The UZG01 communicates with Zigbee2mqqt using serial over IP. For example, if you are using 10 UZG01, you need 10 Zigbee2mqtt instances. But if you think of concrete and thick walls, this is the only way to achieve reliability. I also noticed in my summer house that in case of heavy rain falls, the outdoor network would go down. So better use a UZG01 in my second building.
PoE and ethernet are very interesting because it gives reliability and will work even in power outage (fgiven the PoE source is protected).
In my case, HomeAssistant is installed in one location and I query the UZG01 remotely using a VPN. This seems to work quite well and if this does not I will install local Z2Q instances. But currently I want to make it simple.
I am also working on a quite funny solution. As my PoE ethernet network is in triangle (= like in a company) with 3 switches, in case the UZG01 would go down I can start a secondary UZG01 hidden somewhere in the house with 4G connectivity. In case of rubbery, the attackers would need to disconnect all networks. And as this UZG01 would be located under the roof, good luck. This is just a thought, I never did any testing.
Yes, the UZG01 is a killer product: you can host your own HomeAssistant and connect everywhere on the planet (I am not related to this product, just a user).
The UZG01 is a lot of fun …
Kind regards,
FF
None of that contradics what I said. You want multiple coordinators with multiple z2m instances - makes perfect sense. I run 2 z2m and one ZHA instance myself.
But for routers PoE is just a power source. Maybe with the added convenience of OTA flashing - for now anyway, koenkk has suggested he may add OTA via zigbee to his router fw.
short update from my side
since 2:00am i have 3x more sonoff USBzigbee dongles…
i had waited over 10 h, to realize: my end devices do NOT reorganize by themselfes (use another router). most of them are temp-sensores from aqara, delivering many states in meantime, so thes should not sleeping anyhow? Only if one is losing connection completely due to 0 lqi, i have seen an reconnection to a new router by themselfes… but this happend only to one end device…
but i recognized less lqi in the areas round about 25lqi, but notthing else…
so i started 12:00 to manually repair most of my enddevices… this had an effect in lqis, now many devices bound about 35-135lqi… 0-25 keeps neerly empty… now enddevices are linked to other routers than before…
at 15h i added 8x new power plugs from nous as routers… AND reconnected mostly of all enddevices again … but with no big difference.
then I found something by chance, what i was not aware: the possible interference at used frequencies. so i changed my 3x wifi AP to force wifi channel 6 and 11… zigbee is running with zigbeeChannel11 (what should correspond to wifi channel1), what is now not used any longer…
but without any noticeable effect till now…
zigbee2mqtt map seems to be quite useless
i will keep observing in the next days, so might they need a little bit more time…
Aqara zigbee 1.2 devices (most anything with an ‘11’ in the model number) are generally very “sticky” to whatever router they initially join to, but despite reports to the contrary, they will change routes if necessary.
Some, like the temp sensors seem to switch pretty freely, others like the door contact sensors may take hours to reroute, and usually only if their connected router goes down.
The wifi change should help, can’t hurt.
Did you replace the 20230507 coordinator firmware?
Blockquote
Did you replace the 20230507 coordinator firmware?
yes to the latest stable 20221226
does a Router need a direct connection to the coord? if routers could extend in a mesh “line”, i wonder what the linkquility value of a router is? then it could possibly in the middle of two routers, where two do not have direct connection to the coordinator, but only the closest of this three does have?
just thinking of the sense of my linkquality histographs…
No. In fact, there’s a limit on the number of direct links a co-ordinator can have.
A lot of messages would probably get lost because there would be only one route from one end of the line to the other, however good the link quality was.
Out of interest, what is the software used to create the wireless occupancy (not the network map of Z2M). Thanks.
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