I hope you at least had the Swedish meatballs 
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We buy the frozen ones at the store and also have the sauce mix packets. They have become a new comfort food that we indulge in off and on. We "pepper up" the sauce to give it some kick, and indulge over egg noodles...man, getting hungry just thinking about it. 
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That’s livin’ man. I gotta have the lingonberry drink with it. 
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So I'm nearing a week out, and the three Aqara contact sensors are rock solid, working perfectly. (Dammit...just super-jinxed myself!!)
I'm going from cautiously optimistic to just plain optimistic. 
I know, you say doom is coming, but it feels good right at the moment.
I will go to bed in a bit at which point the sensors will sneak on to my computer and see this post and all immediately disconnect from my hub and leave for Mexico for a week-long bender. [sigh]
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I’ve lost track of why you bought Aqara sensors (already had or glutton for punishment), but the Linkind sensors are $10 each on Amazon (in 2-packs with coupon), work great, look nice, feel sturdy, and are fast. I replaced one of my Iris V2 contact sensors that would occasionally miss a closed event and so far that hasn’t happened with the Linkind.
I needed teeny-tiny sensors w/very long battery life for one particular application - using them attached to the backside of my cooktop's front plate to sense when burners are on and turn a led strip red to remind us we have burners (or the toaster oven) on. We (well, OK, I) have a bad history of walking off and leaving burners on. 
Very tight space and a bit of a PITA to get to, and the Aqara are very small (1.61 x 0.87 x 0.43 inches) and fit the space, and have long lasting batteries from the info I've seen.
In the end if I can't keep them on HE directly I'll use HA and HA bridge to bring them into HE (which @SmartHomePrimer has blessed).
I can't find actual measurements for the Linkind...what are their dimensions?
Ah - found the Linkind dimensions on Amazon. So to compare:
Aqara: 1.61 x 0.87 x 0.43 inches
Likind: 1.62 x 1.25 x 0.56 inches
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A sinner like me is unqualified to bless anything.
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Hi @TMLeafs , I have a simple question for you: After some struggle with trying to flash my Sonoff USB Dongle, I was able to flash the Router firmware into it, but now I just can´t or don´t know how to add it to my HE Zigbee mesh.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
RG
You need to open it up, two screws and it slides out
Then power it and set HE to find ZigBee devices then press the boot button
Once added don't need to change the device handler just unplug and rebuild it and plug back in somewhere and wait a few days and your see more devices use it as a route
For everyone using zigbee2mqtt, do you just do ALL your ZigBee through it? Once Innovelli Blues are out I’ll have a mighty fine ZigBee mesh on my HE’s ZigBee...it seems unfortunate to then have to add repeaters around to support a second mesh for the zigbee2mqtt. Maybe with such a good mesh on my HE I should just overwhelmingly prefer sensors that are very HE-friendly?
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I’m going to go with “no”. I think most people using Zigbee 2 MQTT are doing it either for the economy of a large number of cheap incompatible sensors, or they’re doing it for the challenge and perhaps to keep from replacing devices that they found unreliable on HE (or with certain repeaters).
For me, I bought a second HE for the latter reason. I had 10 Lightify 4-button dimmers that wouldn’t stay connected to HE. It turned out to be a repeater incompatibility (not HE issue) in my case. The 2 Zigbee meshes I have are now split into one that’s almost exclusively lights (a few GE in wall dimmers and Sonoff dongles help out as repeaters in sparse areas), and one that’s focused on sensors and button controllers with a variety of repeaters that have been reliable for me with them. The funny thing is, Hue dimmers still won’t stay connected to either mesh for more than an hour, but I gave up on those a couple years ago and have them on my Hue bridges.
Just wanted to note that I'm two weeks out since setting up the six Aqara contact sensors on my second C7 hub w/the Tradfri plug repeaters.
The 6 sensors have not had any issues, all solid and reporting/behaving as expected. In the past when I added Aqara contact sensors to my primary C7 running all of my other Zigbee sensors and no Ikea repeaters I never got more than a day or two before they would fall off. They do seem to like being mostly alone on the second hub (only other Zigbee devices are the Tradfri repeaters and one Zigbee blind controller).
UPDATE: I have reduced the Z-Wave devices on my Smartthings Hub
- 2 of Yale 1 Conexis L1
- Yale Keyless Connected (Keep)
- 2 of Aeon Siren
- 2 of Aeotec Range Extender 6
- 5 of Aeon Smart Energy Switch 6 (gen5)
The only devices not mains powered are the three locks and the network has been far more stable. I'm also down to 12 devices with me purchasing more Hue Motion Sensors, Sonoff ZBMINI's and two Sonoff USB Sticks my Zigbee network has also improved as I have also removed most of my Smartthings outlets.
Haven't had a Sonoff device drop off since adding the Sonoff sticks
I added an Xbee2 device to map the network which I did b but after a day it seems to of bricked itself
@SmartHomePrimer & @Ken_Fraleigh
OK, I'm here to sit down and have a nice plate of crow...
Two of the Aqara contact sensors fell off the mesh over the past few days. Even w/the Ikea repeaters it's evidently just not going to happen.
I removed the Aqara contact sensors from HE and added them to HA (Conbee/ZHA) and shared them to HE via Home Assistant integration, and have them up and running in my HE automations again.
Sigh...I thought "for one brief shining moment" that I had found Aqaralot, but even w/Ikea repeaters it was not to be...
Now if someone could tell me how to get battery reporting for the Aqara contact sensors into HE that would be useful. Currently the contact sensors come into HE as contact only, no battery info...though the battery info is present in HA. I've asked about this over on the HA thread...
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Its home is in your heart 
Btw, the Linkind contact sensors have been perfect, even the one that is close to the breaker panel.
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Yeah, and I like my Linkind plug, but they are a little too big for the spot I have the Aqara in. I also have a pile of my trusty Visonics still around, so I'm pretty good for contact sensors for now. (But don't tell my wife that...)
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I replaced all my Ikeas with the tiny Tuya USB ones. no issues whatsoever now.
Even direct in HE I find battery reporting for these to be useless. Now I simply keep track of the replacement date and if they start playing up and its 18-24 months I just replace the batteries regardless.
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Thanks for the feedback...I'll probably leave things running from HA for now, since I have it set up. This clearly is a YMMV situation, as others have reported success w/the Ikea repeaters. 
I definitely don't like the extra complexity of running HA to use the Aqaras, but I don't have the patience right now to go through another attempt w/keeping the Aqara's on my C7 directly.
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Yeah I thought I had cracked it but it was short lived. Partly too as the range of the ikea repeaters are low. With the tuyas I still get the odd late checkin alert, but always corrects itself after a couple of hours. I might add that all repeaters are also on battery backup (those cheap 18650 ones from the battery backup thread) to always keep the sensors alive.
Funny you should mention that. I'm in the process of moving z2m, node red etc from my pi4 to a thin client running virtualised HA. Mostly for the extra processing power to run things like frigate for the few cameras I have. Also the pi 4 tends to run fairly warm and needs to be force cooled. Fanless x86 clients are super cool and use not much more power.
I had the same problems, switching to sonoff solved it for me
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