Hello,
I am having signal problems in my large house due to the distance between Zigbee devices.
I have an ihost device and a lot of relays, motion sensors and heat sensors. (they are all sonoff products) Since the relays also act as a kind of router, some other devices increase the signal strength by connecting to the relays.
Since there was no relay in one of the rooms and I did not have anything to use as a gateway, I connected a cable with a plug to a zbmini relay and plugged it into the socket. I was hoping that the relay would be the gateway to the network, but it didn’t happen. What should I do to make my other nearby devices detect this gateway? I reset ihost but it didn’t work.
I also have one more question. I have a zbbrige pro. Can I use this device as a distance extender for zigbee devices?
If you have a spare Zigbee Pro I think you can use it as an extender if you update the firmware on it to Tasmota. That is true of the non-pro version and I expect that one too. Then you can add it to your existing network. At present it will try to create its own network. They should let you change the firmware to their own firmware but at present I think Tasmota have some.
Often poor networking is because it uses the same frequencies as wifi and is weaker. Both Zigbee-to-Home-Assistant (ZHA) and Zigbee2MQTT allow you to choose the wifi band, but the iHost doesn’t and I don’t know how the iHost selects the band. Also in Zigbee2MQTT (and maybe ZHA but I don’t know) you can allow pairing to a specific device rather than all. For example I have a powered Presence sensor outside my gym and it makes sense to pair a standard motion sensor to it. Otherwise you get some really weird routes. These are both features they should implement, as well as Zigbee Network Backups- there is already a common file type ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT use. I think this open source file format is the one they both use: GitHub - zigpy/open-coordinator-backup: Open Zigbee coordinator backup format
In both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT the powered devices on the map look like a mesh. On the one hand it is harder to see the routes, on the other it looks a lot more reliable. I think I prefer the ZHA & Zigbee2MQTT oapproach.