NsPanel Pro and ZBBridge

Ideas & Suggestion Free discussion
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I have bunch of SonOff devices. I bought most of them years ago. I think I might be one of the first users of Zigbee enabled SonOff products.

I have many motion, door, temperature humidity sensors, relay modules and even a couple.of Zigbee buttons.

A couple of monrhs ago my zigbee network became offline. I noticed that my ZBBridge pro became offline. I believe it is bricked or something. I opened the unit and checked the voltages across the board and even some clock signals and they appear kind of typical. I think the flash / bootloader / firmware got corrupted. It is not discoverable anymore and factory reset button didn’t work for me.

Anyway I didn’t want to spend too much time troubleshooting it. Instead of buying a new ZBBridge I decided to buy an NSPanel Pro since it also serves as a zigbee wifi bridge.

I bought one and installed on a wall in a central location in my house.

I noticed that many of the sensors were struggling to connect to NSPanel Pro…May be it is because of it is halfway embedded into the concete wall but I guess it should be considered in design since it was designed to be embedded into a wall.

Now I tried to move some of my devices to a closer location. But it is not practical. I have a fairly big house with multiple floors. I have sensors only at two of the floors

I am planning to troubleshoot my ZBBridge (or buy a new one) so I can extend the range of my Zigbee network but I am confused. zBBridge is not listed as a compatible device under the NSPanel Compatible devices web page list. Is this really the case?

Can I add my ZBBridge Pro to my NsPanel Pro as a range extender and see all my devices on the LCD?

I think it should be possible since Zigbee is a mesh network and what want to do is a very common thing.

If not, how am I supposed to use all my zigbee devices across my house? I invested a lot to these devices.and.switching to another ecosystem doesn’t seem feasible to me. Worst case would be going OpenSource with my existing hardware.

Thanks

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One Zigbee router (extender) won’t do. In most cases, you need several of them and a good idea for planning.
ZBBridge Pro does not act as an extender. No such mode is available. But you can use NSPanel Pro and change its mode. This way you avoid competing for bandwidth, which is not a healthy situation.
But a better solution would be to get rid of ZBBridge and use some extenders for NSPanel Pro. See this thread or read this on HA forum.

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If you don’t mind losing eWeLink features, tasmota firmware should work

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Sure thing but I think he minds loosing eWeLink features :slight_smile:

1 Like
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@Daniel_Zhan Daniel, would you please check this topic ralated to several Zigbee bridges and their functionalities?

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The ZBBridge-P can not join the NSPanel Pro ZIgbee network as it acts as a Zigbee coordinator. I suggest:

  1. Enable the NSPanel Pro “Turbo Mode” so the output power reaches the max level.
  2. Add the router role device like ZBMicro to extent the network, You also can turn on the “Turbo Mode” ZBMicro for the best performance.
    https://itead.cc/product/sonoff-micro-zigbee-usb-smart-adaptor/