I will be monitoring my devices in the next few days for similar issues, however, at the moment I don't see such intensive ZDO messages traffic with any of my devices.
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Try removing the battery for a couple of minutes and then put it again.
Will these messages stop?
wow. I can't believe I see this thread minutes after I made the connection myself.
Today, 3 devices have reported batteries nearly gone. Recall I'm pure zigbee. No doubt i'll take flack for this, but I believe just prior to c8 things were smooth and functional in my and many HE's.
then the world went sideways - strange problems, c8's were first reports coming in then later c7's and others. Of course everyone rushed to resolve one off's thinking it was a bad device or a bad this or that. but the center component to the nexus or core of this problem pile is the HE. There were releases with attempts to mod and fix zigbee issues - and now. I have devices going offline that haven't ever gone bad, a battery go from 75% last week to 36 tonite, and 2 more devices drop from normal to dying batteries. Something has changed at the polling, at the communication or in the commands that is causing my HE zigbee network to suffer and its not my network or my devices. it's the HE. Did the Beta people just miss it? not experience it? too worried about webcore or something else? not a big enough pool of testers? I planned this last weekend to rollback but didn't have the nerve and didn't want to do all the work. I think I have no option but to abandon using the new versions that keep coming out and wait until someone definitively finds the problem. I'm tired of being a guinea pig.
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Although I am no Zigbee expert, I honestly believe that many of the issues experienced by people have to do with the differences between HA 1.2 and Zigbee 3.0. In addition, the vastly increased power/sensitivity of the radio (and antenna), are also sources of issues.
Upgrading is never easy, even when the "experts" claim upwards compatibility.
Personally, I migrated over a Zwave Hub, and I'm doing Zigbee on a device by device basis. Yes, there are adjustments to be made. Conventional wisdom is that there should be no changes when converting over. In practise, I've found that every situation is different. In my situation, I had to turn down the power of my Zigbee radio significantly until I found something that worked well. I found that in many cases, repeaters were not needed. (This is my experience - your mileage may vary!).
Yes, this is a major upgrade. Yes, it can be painful. Is it worth it? It depends...
Postscript about batteries (@jshimota ):
I just wanted to share with you my experience about draining batteries on the new C-8. I recently installed a Iris V2 Motion Sensor. It has a CR2 battery, and it usually lasts 1-2 years. I paired it in my lab, and then went to install it (all the way on the other side of my house). After a day or two, I noticed that it showed up on my Device Activity report, so I promptly took it down, and re-paired it. Before I put it back up (it's actually outside, under an eavestrough), I noticed that the battery strength was only 50% WTF? I just put in a fresh battery!
Here is what I suspect happened:
After pairing the device the first time, it established a route and it's way to the Hub. When I put it back up, it still tried to get back to that first route (which was now very far away). Battery drain!!!
Lesson learned: if at all possible, pair in place - do not pair far away from its eventual place.
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I have to comment that I have a C7 and I am also presenting this problem with 3 zigbee devices, the battery discharges and lasts 2 months and in another 99% drop to 8% and it disconnects. The devices are Sonoff motion sensors.
while I appreciate your sharing. there is no science - you're simply supporting the 'its the device, it can't be the hub' mystique.
No... batteries dont go 'bad' because routes. show me your route table.
You are quite right in your comment that I have no "hard evidence" only "anecdotal supposition" that battery life is very dependant on the route that devices take in order to get their signal back to the hub.
However, my real example was not intended to be a "whitewash" of any hub.
There are many incidents of excessive battery drainage of Zigbee devices (in these forums, or in other forums) which can be directly attributed to the non-strategic placement of repeating devices.
I'm sure that's one of the reasons that a rule of thumb of pairing is to first try and pair in place. And, to try and work outwards from the Hub. If you investigate the documents from SiliconLabs that's how they designed Zigbee - to be a mesh network.
As previously stated, my example was not intended to be an exoneration of any hub. The fact that we have seen multiple releases of 2.3.5.x with various Zigbee tweaks is an indication that some items had been lacking in the initial releases of the Zigbee software on the C-8.
Have they got all of the bugs? Are there still issues? To be frank, I have no idea, and only time will tell.
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Note that Zigbee end devices can't find routes; the only thing they're capable of finding is a parent router that's in direct range and has resources/capacity to support them; it's always 1 hop away and a direct connection to the end device. It's the job of the always-on router to maintain routes for its child devices, and store and forward all messages from them (as well as buffer messages sent to them). Not the same scheme as simpler Z-Wave repeaters and Z-Wave end devices which store pre-calculated routes (and find their own via frame flooding if need be).
That said, if the connection to the parent is marginal causing retransmissions (or the end device frequently detects a lost link to its parent and needs to go through the orphan scan/rejoin process to find another one) battery life could be seriously impacted. A parent device (which could be the hub) can evict a child device if it detects that it hasn't checked in within a pre-determined timeout interval; if that isn't handled properly (the intervals aren't the same for all devices) devices would be orphaned erroneously.
True also that its always best to join Zigbee devices 'in place' as long as that place is within range of a router (but in a properly functioning mesh, end devices should have no issues being relocated and joining another in-range router that has capacity to host it).
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i'd like to add - while I've heard of a few battery powered routers... I've never seen or owned one, that's why 'mains' powered routers. (ie: power derived from house outlet/socket etc.).
There have been some notorious routers - and it is important to understand the distiction of the various zigbee versions as well 2.0 and 3.0, and finally ZHA and ZLL confusion. Like USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, there is backward compatibility in most cases today. Another caveat is zigbee3 devices may be 3.0 hardware, but the firmware is still 2.0, and we all are surely aware how firmware updates are a weak point in all hubs, not just HE.
edit while reading elsewhere I was triggered to remember that some folks are now using sticks for repeaters - generally usb devices with zigbee radios as repeaters, ala aeotec dongles, xbee hardware etc.
Assume you meant SonOff USB Dongles... 
And yes, they are pretty great.
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Aeotec does make a dedicated Zigbee repeater. Puts out ~9dbm signal and costs $30 on Amazon. I havenât tried it. Just looking since it doesnât have an external antenna and costs the same or more than the Sonoff. If it repeats as well as the last Samsung (Samjin) outlet, it wouldnât be a bad deal by any means.
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I have one (Aeotec Xi) -- seems to be working very well overall, but I don't have any fancy sniffer tools to confirm nitty-gritty details.
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Interesting - had no idea that existed, thanks for pointing it out.
Does it show up in http://put.Hub.IP.Here/hub/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo
If it's doing a fair amount of repeating for you it should be present...
It does indeed - that's how I'm confirming it works overall. I just mean I can't compare detailed performance via XBEE etc.
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Yup...I've got an Xbee USB stick coming from ebay in a week or so, so I can get a better idea of what's going on w/my Zigbee network.
Oh, and if anyone is interested, I offered him a few bucks (not sure how much, it was in pounds) less than his posted price and he accepted it quickly, so he is negotiable.
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I'm sure you will, but definitely post about it once you get it, and what all steps you took to get it going. I've been curious about these for awhile, but most threads seem to make them sound more complicated than I care to play with.
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I actually have one of these boys that I got with some spare Zigbee stuff off a mate. (Thrown in the box)
What tools will you be using with it? If you donât mind me asking.
I sort of only vaguely know at this point. I'll be starting here when it arrives:
And @Tony shared below info with me:
The software part is free. You get it from Digi, the place to start is here (the link works, for some reason the preview doesn't):
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Legend 
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