So I have a couple of zigbee devices that are misbehaving. There are two keen vents in the same room, one of them would always show INACTIVE BUT still respond to open/close command.
Then I have these two sengled zigbee bulbs. The Front right would stop responding almost daily now. When I go into the Front Right device page, and clicks the configure/on/off a few times and it will turn ON or OFF correctly. Why is that?
Are these two issue because they are being routed badly? I do have 4 other singled bulbs nearby so I am wondering if they are being routed via these bulbs. I just place an order for the digi USB zigbee stick so that I can map the network to see how they are routed.
Sengled bulbs don't act as repeaters; they are one of the few (only?) smart bulbs that do not do that. I'd be curious to know what the RSSI (signal strength indicator) is for your problematic bulbs. You can see it in the Zigbee logging (from Zigbee settings page). Sometimes you can get an idea of how your devices are routed (the RSSI will be the from the last hop-- either the signal strength from device itself if it is a child of the hub, or otherwise it will be the signal strength from whatever routing device it is a child of).
The values I usually see range from -50 (from a device or repeater close to the hub) to -90 (from my farthest Xiaomi's that can't go through repeaters). I haven't seen anything weaker than that on my mesh, which is pretty reliable. Keep in mind the RSSI value also would include noise (or an interfering network) as well.
So the rssi for front left is 51 and the rssi for front right is 81. Obviously they are not connected to the same router. What are my options? Power down the hub for 15 minutes the back on to let the mesh rebuild? Or delete and repair front right?
probably the best way is to do the heal (especially if you have never done one); but if everything else is working well I'd probably go with trying a reset and rejoin of that one bulb. It wouldnt take too long to see if it rejoined through a stronger repeater. Although now that I think of it, if the Sengled bulbs are as finicky to reset as some of the Cree or Osrams, the heal might be easier to do.
If it doesn't improve things, you might want to see if anything about the location of that bulb could be responsible for the weaker signal (maybe something metallic in or near the fixture is shielding it).
It's similar to Z-Wave repair but instead of clicking a Z-Wave repair in the UI. You just leave the hub off for more than 15 mins and Zigbee will do a mesh repair automatically when the hub is back on. It does take time for the heal to complete.
Well that didn't fix my bulb issue. Still not responsive until I click on/off a few time from the device page. RSSI for it is still high at 73 compare to 48 for the left bulb. The are 3 feet from each other.
They are front porch lights and right outside the front door. I have repeaters about 7 to 8 feet away from them. Good idea about swapping location of them will have to give that a shot later after work.
I had to buy a Zigbee switch to act as a repeater for my front porch. I hard a hard time still so I just flicked it on and off 4 times again to re-start the join process again.
It worked great after I rejoined it with the repeater in place.
That's what it looks like; you might be able to tell which router it is by looking for a nearby repeater that also is showing -58 (or -73). Pretty sure that kind of hunting behavior is what causes some battery powered Zigbee devices to have poor battery life while others of the same type do not, but not sure what causes it. Maybe something in the router is flaky and intermittent. Could be why you are seeing the same type of behavior from that bulb. If you could find out which router it is and disable it, it seems likely that the bulb would work just fine joined to the network without it (-73 and -58 are workable signal levels). On the other hand, maybe the radio in the bulb is flaky and responsible for both the -73 and -58 signal strength indications; difficult to say without a real map of your mesh.
Mouser just shipped the didi zigbee stick so hopefully next week I can map the network. But I'll try to add another repeater to the porch above that two lights then re-join the right light to see if it'll get better.
So does the bulb still perform poorly in its swapped location? It might be a flaky bulb. None of those RSSI values seem abnormal at least based on what I see in my network; I had a device that was exceeding - 90 occasionally and I had to relocate it to make it work reliably, but I have other devices in the -80s that work okay.
Since the RSSI values include noise (if it falls in the right frequency band during the right time interval, you could get a strong RSSI value on a noisy link so it's not always an absolute measure of goodness) they are always going to flop around a bit. What would be more concerning would be if the routing kept changing. Not sure it's possible to know exactly what's going on with that at this point.
Lqi is a link quality Index, anything nearing 255 is a strong link (255 is the top of the range). I believe this value is computed by an
end device when it is deciding which router to choose as a parent.
