Help with Zigbee network Sengled E1C-NB7

Thank you for that.

Okay so several things become apparent. First off, the first outlet you added is definitely a repeater, so all the other outlets will also work as repeaters, when they are added back. However, the inCost and outCost of that outlet are kind of high. I am hoping that once you complete your mesh, both those numbers are closer to 1 for all your outlets.

Second, it looks like you may have added all the leak sensors before you added the outlets. So when we are done re-pairing the outlets and are convinced the mesh is stable, we will re-pair your leak sensors.

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Okay, it looks like I have some work to do!

Iā€™ll re-pair them as you instructed and let you know.

Thanks

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When I re-pair them, and It says ā€œfound one previously joined deviceā€ and then its name.

Do I click on the name?

Sure. That will take you to the device page

I canā€™t seem to pair any devices now. In the messages icon, top right, it says my Zigbee network is offline.. I didnā€™t turn it off. This is warranty hub I just received today.

I also canā€™t change the channel, it keeps reverting back to 11.

  1. Make sure all your apps are still disabled.
  2. Shut your hub down from the Settings menu.
  3. Remove power (unplug it from the wall, not the microUSB end)
  4. Wait a couple minutes.
  5. Power up the hub.

It still says offline.

Open a warranty claim.

Tagging @support_team

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Attached is a screenshot of the Zigbee mesh after re-pairing the outlets.

I also received confirmation on the outlets later today, they said:

Hi,

I just received my new hub today as a warranty and I set it up but canā€™t add devices because it says Zigbee network offline.

Did you try doing a shutdown, and pull the power cord at the wall for a minute or so before powering up?

@bobbyD

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Yes

Hi there, I checked your new hub and your ZigBee controller appears to be working as expected. If you see a message in the upper right corner stating that Zigbee is offline, do you mind sending me a private message or share a screenshot of your hub's interface?

Have consolidated 2 of your threads into one.

Here is a screen shot or the network as of this morning.

Is this more of what youā€™re looking for?

That page gives you a good picture of what repeaters are good enough (RF wise) to be used for routing on the first hop to the rest of the mesh. You want to see one or more repeaters with strong bidirectional links to the hub. Ideally, they will be stable so that routing paths also remain stable.

There's two ways of looking at the info here and they corroborate each other since this page reports link status as well as recently used first hop routers: repeaters with low nonzero cost figures (shown in the Neighbor Table) should be the repeaters actively being chosen for routing (shown in the Route Entry section).

It's easy to see which repeaters have been used recently from the Route Table entries, which show Outlets 11, 12, 19, 20 and 26 as the first hop 'vias' being used to send messages.

From this you'd deduce that the other repeaters aren't as active (at least in the timeframe the page was captured; if a route hasn't been used recently, a new route request is generated and route table entries may change).

The inCost/outCost figures give you a clue as to why the other repeaters aren't being used. For example, the link to Outlet 5 has a very weak signal at the hub's receiver (hub reported low LQI on this link, resulting in high inCost) and outbound at Outlet 5's receiver (Outlet 5 reported high outCost; from this we can infer that Outlet 5's LQI is low). Similar story for the unused repeaters; Zigbee's routing strategy favors low 'cost' routes so it will pick repeaters with good bidirectional reception (link costs get ranked in order of best =1, poorest=7; with 0 meaning no status/unusable).

So as of the time of that snapshot, outlets 11, 12, 19, 20 and 26 are your key repeaters. Their status gets reported roughly every 15 seconds; if conditions change (signal blockage, interference, HW failure) , the hub may change routing to use a better repeater if one is available. If there's no viable repeaters (or only ones with poor cost figures), communication issues result.

The destination devices (the nulls followed by short ID's in the Route Table section) would normally be showing their assigned name instead of null. As the short ID's change with every rejoin (and eventually get re-associated to their assigned name), it looks like many of these have been recently rejoined; probably they are the end devices that were previously child devices of the hub.... now they are child devices of the repeaters elsewhere in the mesh. The nulls should be replaced by the device's assigned name after a while if things are stable.

If you're not seeing issues with your end devices or repeaters, you don't need to worry about the repeaters showing poor cost figures; the mesh is finding a useable path in spite of them. If you are seeing issues (can't reliably send commands or see correct status on the device page) you should probably try to improve the mesh (by relocating marginal repeaters or adding an intermediate repeater somewhere in between).

If you are having issues with mesh stability (the devices in the neighbor table change significantly within a short amount of time, nulls always showing instead of device names) something else is going on... that's when you'd be looking at the environment (for interference) or possibly a flaky device.

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Thanks Tony for this informative post.

A couple of questions:

  1. What are low non-zero cost figures? And how can I get them into the Route Entry table?

  2. InCost is the repeater signal back to the hub and outCost is signal back to repeater?

  3. What would be the reason why some devices have a high LQI, low inCost and outCost but still in the Neighbor Table Entry?

Thanks

FYI, I coincidentally bought 2 of these Sengled smart plugs and installed them today. Went through the exact same situation as you where they were both unresponsive within 20 minutes of getting them paired as ā€œGeneric Zigbee Outletā€. Resetting and repairing worked just like it did for yours. Not sure why this happened, but they seem to be working as expected now.

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Cost figures are derived from LQI and used to rank Zigbee route hops by link quality. Each Zigbee hub and repeater computes its LQI figure by some proprietary method; usually based on signal strength at its receiver (some implementations can track link error rates). This number (ranging from 1-255) gets mapped to a cost number (ranging from 7 down to 1) which gets transmitted on the link during periodic status exchanges which happen about 4 times a minute, even when there is no message traffic.

The number transmitted to the device at the remote end of the link during a status exchange is designated the inCost; the number received from the remote device during a status exchange is designated the outCost.

So with inCost/outCost figures you get a measure of reception and transmission quality at each end of the link. When the link quality isn't symmetrical, the hub or device can have a link with high LQI/low inCost (strong reception) but high outCost (weak transmission, resulting in low LQI measured by the remote receiver).

If the remote end of the link fails to report link status (it's allowed a number of 'age' intervals as a grace period), an outCost of 0 is assigned. So..... you want to see low, nonzero numbers for inCost/outCost for links in the neighbor table. These numbers don't appear in the Route Table entries at all; those entries just describe the first hop of a route.

The Neighbor table will normally show any repeaters within range of the hub (up to a limit of 16) that are reporting (or have reported) link status. If there are more than 16 within range, the poorest ones (based on link status metrics) should eventually be evicted from the table and replaced with better ones.

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