[RELEASE] Zigbee Monitor Driver - Like XRAY Vision for Zigbee Repeaters and simple Switches

[JamesTX10]

I am now seeing these errors running 1.0.8

[garyjmilne]

It seems this error occurs when the driver has trouble getting the routing information and is not handling a null issue correctly. What type of Repeater is it? Do you have more than one of these and does it happen on every one? Do any of these repeaters show the Routing information correctly ike this:

[JamesTX10]

I have 2 of the Aeotec Range Extender Zi and it happens on both of them. They both show device routes:

[garyjmilne]

Would you mind trying this and let me know if it clears it up?

GaryMilne/Hubitat-Zigbee/blob/main/Zigbee_Monitor_Driver.groovy.1.0.9

[JamesTX10]

I have applied this code. Will watch for errors

[JamesTX10]

No errors

[John_Land]

I have a number of range extenders, most are Tuya devices that look like this:

They were showing up in Hubitat's Home "Lights" indicator as being ON. So I set the Switch Behavior preference to "On\Off controls will start\stop the scheduled data collection", and turned them all OFF.

However, now I'm wondering whether I should periodically turn them ON to collect "scheduled data", or is some data collected anyway (just that the device no longer looks like a light to Hubitat)?

[mluck]

If a device that uses this driver is still showing a normal flow of events, but the healthStatus attribute indicates "Offline", how should I interpret this similarly inconsistent evidence?

I use healthStatus to warn myself of potential mesh issues, but everything seems to be working okay, so I'm wondering if it could be a false positive. Appreciate any advice.

[garyjmilne]

@John_Land

So I set the Switch Behavior preference to "On\Off controls will start\stop the scheduled data collection", and turned them all OFF.

This setting allows you to turn the scheduled data collection on and off when you are using the driver on a dedicated Zigbee router. If your network was stable you might just leave it off most of the time and only turn it on when you wish to do some troubleshooting. However, if you want the Zigbee data updating regularly then you should leave it on.

When it is in the on state you should see some jobs.

[John_Land]

OK, thanks, good to know.

However, is there any way to make the driver not look like a “light“ to Hubitat?

[garyjmilne]

You can look in the State Variables area to see the time of the last Zigbee activity.

If there has been no Zigbee activity for Inactivity Limit

then it will attempt to do a ping when there is 5 minutes remaining (Set Log Level to Debug for this output)

That should give you some tools to debug your issue.

[mluck]

I continue to really struggle with the health of my network. 90% of my devices work great nearly 100% of the time, but a handful seem to operate very inconsistently.

Last year, I bet on a few Sonoff Dongles to both improve the quality of my mesh and improve my x-ray vision (to steal Gary's terminology). I don't think I've accomplished either, and I'd love to learn from other people's experience so I can enhance both.

Right now, two of Sonoff dongles are offline. They went offline at the same time a couple days ago. I've done a mesh "shock", to no avail. I've also optimized for wifi coexistence (my 3 hubs are channels 15/20/25 and my 3 wifi APs are 1/6/11)--at least I think I have.

I'm beginning to wonder if my choice of Sonoff was a bad idea. Whadya all think?

Finally, I'm not so sure I'm extracting the diagnostic insight I should from my ZMD devices that are online. For example: why would there be device neighbors or device children listed with a network address but no device name? And the network addresses don't even exist in my zigbee table on the hub? One of my online ZMD repeaters shows this value for deviceChildren: "170 - 96C1,170 - 0024,170 - 0013", which I interpret to be LQI of 170 for the 3 listed network addresses. But none of those addresses exist on the hub. So I'm stumped.

Lastly, does anyone know how do I get these dongles back on online? Docs I've read suggest a reboot (i.e., unplug, wait 10 seconds, plug back in). I tried but no joy.

Before I go crazy Amazon buying new repeaters, I thought maybe a bit expertise would be called for. Appreciate any wise counsel....TIA.

[Slate]

I have a few repeaters that also drop off once in awhile. I need to re-add them to the mesh. They slot right in to where they were, and any rules using them will still work.

[danabw]

You might be interested in this discussion related to Sonoff dongles...

Another USB zigbee 3.0 repeater

I got these zigbee 3.0 USB repeaters a while back. They are about $10 each on Aliexpress. They've worked really well as repeaters; I have about 7 devices using one of them, while the others have 1-2 devices they're repeating for. In the same location, they have a higher LQI than the original TuYa USB zigbee 3.0 repeaters, or Sonoff Dongle-P flashed as a repeater. And with a reset button on the device, they're easier to reset than either the Dongle-P or the original TuYa USB repeater. [image] …

My SonOff dongles still work and repeat fine. One of five goes offline occasionally, but a simple power cycle gets it back online.

[garyjmilne]

I gave up using the Sonoff S31s.

Zigbee Routing with Sonoff S31 Lite appears to be bad

This is the back part of our house which has its own hub. The large box is an office above a 2 car garage and measures 24' x 24.This is what the network looks like after a reset and repair of most of the devices. [image] There are 4 repeaters titled, XBEE+, Cam Plug, Cam Plug and a newly introduced one with a MAC address ending B087(below Thermo+, a + indicated 2nd floor) newly introduced for testing. The three non XBEE repeaters are all Sonoff S31 Lite. If you look closely you will see that…

I later on used a bunch of MINI repeaters and had this outcome:

TUYA Mini USB Repeaters - Zigbee Meltdown - A Cautionary Tale

A little over a year ago I bought 4 of the TUYA Mini USB Repeaters. At first they seemed to work well and I gave then a shout out here. A couple of months ago one died without too much fanfare and I replaced it with a generica TUYA equivalent. A few days ago I was trying to pair an XBEE to my C-8 Pro and it just would not go. I tried all kinds of things like updating the Hub, moving the Hub, changing my WiFi channels, bypassing Zigbee 3.0 repeaters, pairing in the open. etc. Eventually I de…

Finally I settled on using a bunch of IKEA plugs. They were reasonably priced and have been very reliable for me and it's been over a year. The only tweak I had to do was that I had a lot of Zigbee stuff happening at 10:00PM and sometimes something would get missed. I spaced things out into batches by 10 seconds and now I almost never have a problem.

[mluck]

how do you re-add them? The only thing I know is to unplug the dongle, wait a bit, and plug it back in. The original join process was super wanky.

[mluck]

@danabw

onOff singles still work and repeat fine. One of five goes offline occasionally, but a simple power cycle gets it back online.

Thanks for sharing that thread -- didn't see it. I may give that device a try because I just can't get 2 of my 4 sonoff dongles to rejoin. Grrr.

[mluck]

@garyjmilne

I gave up using the Sonoff S31s.

Thanks Gary, but I was talking about the Sonoff dongles, not the plug-in outlets. Also -- did you see my question about network addresses? So weird.

[mluck]

@garyjmilne

I had a lot of Zigbee stuff happening at 10:00PM

sorry I'm confused by this -- what kind of zigbee activity would cluster around a specific point in time?

[danabw]

If you have automations turning a bunch of Zigbee plugs or lights on or off, or making changes to their settings, then you're going to have a lot of traffic at a specific time.