You will run into trouble again. There is no ZigBee 3 temp/humid sensor from Aqara right now.
I have tons of the same sensors and work flawlessly with the Aqara hub but not so well directly pair to Hubitat or Home Assistant Zigbee2Mqtt.
Hi Tom, Thanks for the suggestion. I'll share what some others have commented, which is that the Sonoff lite Zigbee plugs don't have the strongest signal. Please search the forums and you'll see
1 Like
Can confirm.
1 Like
I think you will find that the problem was with the S31 plugs. I have found the S40 plugs to be extremely reliable and have good coverage.
Once paired with the S40 plug, none of my Aqara devices drop off the mesh.
It's not the strongest so go with Sonoff 3 dongle. I have 3 Aqara temp/humid sensors around 100 feet away without issue for over a year. This is at my brother's house running Home assistant where you can pick router to pair the device to with Zigbee2MQTT.
1 Like
I have always wondered how this works on Z2M and whether it works always or not…
Has anyone looked at Z2M code or sniffed how a Zigbee device can be forced to join the network via specific router?
I’ve had good luck simply bringing the device really close to the repeater I want it to use and rejoining. Worked for me. The rejoined devices will mark the repeater as their parent device. These relationships are visible with the Zigbee Monitor Driver.
I don't know about the code but there's a dropdown menu where you select which router you want to pair a device to. 99% success rate for me.
1 Like
Ok, I have some questions about these so called gateways or extenders and more specifically these Sonoff 3 Dongle Plus devices.
- To use these do I just need to plug them into a USB adapter that is plugged into the wall?
- I take it then that I will need to get software for these Sonoff devices?
- Then in the Sonoff software I pair the Zigbee sensors etc to these gateways?
- Then I need to add these gateways to the Hubitat C8?
- Do I need to add something more to the Hubitat (an app or something) for these Sonoff gateways? I keep seeing mention of the Zigbee2MQTT. Is this something already part of the Hubitat or something I need to add?
Sorry for all the questions. Just trying to wrap my head around this whole thing. Most of my home automation has been stuff tied to Alexa, which might be easy, but not as powerful.
SonOff USB Dongle questions answered here...once prepared and joined to Hubitat, the dongle is like any other Zigbee repeater in Hubitat.
By the way, you're not a Ravenous Bug Blatter Beast of Traal, are you? If so, I'm both frightened and honored by your presence. 
1 Like
LOL
I've never heard of that ever. But hey if it works in my favor, I can go with it.
Thanks for the reference on the SonOff devices. I'll read up on that while my amazon shipment is on the way.
1 Like
Interesting.. handy capability to have. I'm not familiar with Zgibee2MQTT but from googling it looks like parent forcing is done by via the 'permit join' ZDO command; it takes a device ID as a parameter and can enable network joins on a specific router node.
I found this; it's an old link though, Evidently a couple of years ago they added support for this feature.
5 Likes
I played with this and I actually succeeded to force pairing with a specific device. I tested it with IKEA devices that need to pair only the Hub in order to function properly. This functionality is now baked in version 3.7.0 of the ikea-zigbee-drivers package.
Thanks for tagging me! 
2 Likes
