Update: Around 5 days since a hue sensor dropped for me. Fully patched and increased ZigBee transmit power. The areas I had dropping do have repeaters but the RSSI is poor.
P Version or E or doesn't matter ? Seems like the P version has a link to firmware to set to repeater or router whatever you guys are calling lol. I'm finding out that That the C8 doesn't seem to like Hue repeaters or Sonoff outlet repeaters as much as it likes my Xbee's 3's. Going to ditch the hue and Sonoff.
I've only used the P version of the dongle, so no experience w/the newer E. I know some folks here are using the E - you may find posts from them in my SonOff topic, and you could hit them up for any info they have. The SonOff USB dongle does work for me, and has been more active with the C-8 than it was w/the C-7. I got them primarily for help w/two things:
Zigbee Presence sensor/automation that had to reach out into my driveway to see the arrival of a Zigbee device in our cars: ZigBee Arrival Sensor For Car
Support for Aqara contact sensors which I would like to use directly on my hub. Aqara/Xiaomi generally do not play well w/the Hubitat hub (lots of "how do I keep them connected?" topics on them in this forum).
The dongles worked for the presence sensors, but the Aqara sensors never seem to route through the dongles. On the other hand, since I added the SonOff dongles the Aqara sensors have been more reliable, so it's a little confusing what's actually going on. But I'll take improvement over problems.
Never used any other SonOff products or the Hue repeaters, so no experience there, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately).
Thanks for all the info, Yeah I never paid attention to the signals from the repeaters back to the C5 from the Hue and sonoff. Most of the Stuff was routing through the Xbee 3's at the time but they're the ones with the external antennas that go for miles. From what I see the hue and the sonoff have pretty bad signal with Both the C8 and C5 but the C5 seems to not care. Can you use the Sonoff dongles to show your network performance like you can with the Xbee 3's ?
Not that i'm aware of, but I'm not a very technical guy, mostly borrow other peoples smarts, so there may be a way I'm not aware of. The dongle doesn't have a device-specific driver on Hubitat, defaults to "Device" but most of us assign the Ikea Tradfri Signal Repeater driver, as leaving it on Device results in noise/chatter in the logs.
Zigbee radio had another minute long outage this afternoon.
That was about 2 hours after the Hue Outdoor Motion was joined.
I didn't notice it until I looked at the logs.
Looking at the log, it seemed to me that the Hue Outdoor Motion hadn't reported anything for a couple of hours. I hit refresh and configure and got no response.
I went out on the driveway, almost falling on the ice, and verified that the sensor stopped working.
I did a soft reset and db restore about an hour before the last activity, but I'm thinkin' that's not a factor.
Went out again, cut it down. Non reactive.
Pressed setup once, added zigbee device, found previously added device, chose that
Back in business.
What's interesting is that it was so strong in range performance earlier.
I'll let it run overnight inside and maybe zip tie it back to the tree tomorrow.