Raspberry PI with hassio in the basement, with the skyconnect stick.
in the first floor i have a sonoff Stick, flashed with the latest router firmware.
i can connect my HW, no issue there z.b. SONOFF Motion Sensor, and after it is connected it works some time from hours to days … but after some time the connection seems to be lost and i dont know why and how.
this is my setup
if i reset some devices in the setup … so reconnect skyconnect or the router, or remove the battery from the EG_MOTION sensor, it sometimes starts to work again but only sometimes … so i am not able to say “everytime i reconnect the skyconnect stick it starts to work again”
nothing special i find in the logs … hopefully someone can point me in the right direction otherwise i will have to remove zigbee.
btw. the temp and humitiy sensor from Aqara work fine the entire time, no issues. But the Aqara Airquality sensor has the same issue … how i that possible?
Remove all the end devices (the green ones). Buy and install more routing devices (light bulbs, wall sockets, maybe a couple more Sonoff sticks like the one you have).
Start by placing the routers fairly near the SkyConnect and work outwards. A Zigbee signal is weak - it can travel quite a long way in ideal conditions, but a good rule of thumb is to put them 10-15 feet apart. The aim is to create a mesh of routers placed so that any one of them can communicate with as many of the others as possible.
This map comes from the ZHA integration - the routers are the oval shapes - but you get the idea.
When you have a strong web of connections between the routers, add the end devices - ideally again not more than 10-15 feet from the nearest router.
At the moment you’re treating your router like a wi-fi extender, which is not how Zigbee works - you need a lot of routers so that messages can be passed from one to the next by different routes, depending on traffic and obstacles like walls.
the router is directly above the skyconnect stick just in the next floor, and the router is no connection issues i always have a connection
and the temp sensors work fine too, one of them has the highest distance of all devices.
and even if i bring the motion sensor right next to the router the behavior does not change i really tried a lot.
but more then 3 nodes per router should be no problem
and i have 1 router and 1 operator …
and its not that the motion sensor has bad connection … he has perfekt connection, until it gets disconnected, and after that disconnect it never gets connected again without manual interaction.
but i’ll try i have a second sonoff router but just not flashed, will flash it and give it a try
You’re assuming all devices operate exactly the same and behave themselves. You can’t treat it like wifi like Stilljack said
Honestly various vendors have played fast and loose with how they rediscover routing devices. I’d bet money those devices you say keep dropping are connecting directly to the coordinator and ignoring the router. Devices can absolutely make up thier own mind like that onnwhtaythey THINK is the best route. You can try to rejoin the through the router device and they MAY stick but… Doubtful.
The only way to combat it is make sure you’re very picky about what devices you deploy, vbe very wary about rf interference and use LOTS of routers. Not one. Not two or three. as many as you can.
When they are connected they connect to the router (at least zigbee2mqtt shows that)
but if zigbee really sucks that much as you say and it is by design unpredictable, uncontrollable chaos i think will throw them all in the bin and use knx and wifi also for this devices.
I like it if things predictively work, or if they do not work are at least following scientific rules and not just doing what they want
it switches me stairs light … i need something that switches on every time i need it in every possible condition, like my knx sensors … if my wife has no light when she wants to grab something to drink in the night the WAF is not really increasing
Research the vendors. If you stick to a few vendors and understand how it works you won’t have a problem.
Its designed to be a low power mesh that adapts to conditions not a hub and spoke. You’re treating it like hub and spoke.
The endpoints are designed to hunt parents and outliers are actually devices that get sticky to parents and won’t let go even if the parent disappears.
That said I do like predictability and I achieve that by making sure I have lots of mesh routing devices everywhere (half of the wall outlets in my home are zigbee now, they form the backbone of my repeater mesh) but I make choices like using Sengled bulbs because they are available in my power requirements and sizes, have a good rgb color reproduction, and do not act as repeating devices (isolating my repeating mesh to the outlets)
I then made sure my zigbee channel didn’t overlap with my 2.4Ghz wifi channels and I have never had a device drop. And my home is stucco over wire mesh… I live in a Faraday cage. And it still works.
i just have 2 vendors … sonoff and aqara? and i just have 6 devices overall in the network, and the highest dist is from a router to an end device are ~4m
i don’t want to believe that it is pure “random” it always works when i reestablish the network it just stops to work after some days or weeks … and it is always the motion sensor … and i tried 2 different ones from sonoff and 2 different ones from aqara … is there really no possibility to ask the zigbee network why they drop and why they do not reconnect, even if i put them right next to the router and even if i shut down all other zigbee devices?
as soon as i found my other router device will try it with an additional router
