Zigbee Bridge as Router for Zigbee Bridge Pro?

Ideas & Suggestion Free discussion
1

Hi all

I currently have 2x Zigbee Bridge in my system on different sides of the house as the distance is too far to connect all Zigbee end devices to a single bridge.

I have now bought a Zigbee Bridge Pro (in the hope of LAN mode and synching it with iHost in the near future) and now want to properly set up a Zigbee mesh across my whole house.

I already have a few Zigbee Mini’s to act as routers, but am worried that this will still not be sufficient to provider full coverage.

I am hence looking for other devices that I can use as routers to extend my network - and have everything still in the Ewelink app.

I have found that I can flash the Zigbee Bridge with router firmware - but will it then still be able to connect to the Zigbee Bridge Pro with original Ewelink firmware on it? And will I be able to add stock Sonoff end devices (temp and motion sensors) via this router and have them in the Ewelink app (same as when I add them directly to the Bridge Pro)?

Has anyone here ever tried this?

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@StephenJ - would you maybe know?

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Based on my knowledge, I don’t think your proposed setup will reliably work as intended due to firmware compatibility risks.

While the device may allow it to act as a signal repeater, there is a strong chance it will lose integration with the eWeLink app. Different firmware often conflicts when used together.

So even if the flashed bridge can connect to the Zigbee Bridge Pro, the end devices paired through it likely won’t appear in the eWeLink app anymore. There are always risks in trying to combine firmware not specifically designed to interoperate.

4

Thanks a lot for the feedback, @StephenJ

May I ask that you internally submit as a future feature request for the Zigbee Bridge to switch it into repeater mode (fully functional with the eWeLink app)?

If I am not mistaken, the ZBMini is currently the only device that acts as Zigbee repeater (and some plugs which are not available for every country), so having another device to extend/strengthen the Zigbee network would be very helpful in my view

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5

@StephenJ I would also ask Sonoff to add Router support to the Zigbee Bridge Pro. I noticed that is now an experimental feature on the NSPanel Pro, so I’m glad Sonoff finally recognizes how needed this feature is. For my setup, I’m using Zigbee2MQTT on Home Assistant via the Sonoff USB Zigbee Dongle Plus, along with a Zigbee Bridge Pro and an NSPanel Pro. Just turned on the router function on the NSPanel Pro & hoping the Bridge Pro will get a similar option soon.

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