Tired of the unreliable connectivity of Wifi when controlling critical stuff like lights, I want to move to Zigbee.
I’m going to move everything to the Hue bulbs, but I want to use something connected directly to HA for the hub. Anyone have some clear advice on a good, available USB dongle for Home Assistant, config/setup/adding Hue lights?
Zigbee is notorious for mesh instability, mostly because some devices (looking at you, Lightify) are picky about what repeaters they use in the mesh. Build your mesh slowly, spread some good repeaters around your house, and give the mesh time to settle down before using it in production. Don’t move repeater nodes or power them off. (I had some lights that I had to delete and re-add every two weeks, until I figured out that the cleaners were unplugging a repeater to plug in their vacuum:-) Finally, make use of the “Visualization” tab under Configure to see what’s happening on your mesh.
My plan is to stick with Hue bulbs as much as possible. More expensive, but seem to be the most solid hardware.
Each device is a repeater, right? So I should try to make every device’s potential signal overlaps multiple others?
I have half dozen Hue bulbs, and they seem rock-solid - far more stable than my Lightify bulbs.
The HA SkyConnect does seem to be a factor. For a while, my Lightify bulbs were the last thing on my old Samsung SmartThings hub (via the HA integration- basically using the ST hub as a Zigbee radio/stack), because they operated more reliably there.
Yes, every line-powered device is (probably) a repeater. Many light bulbs are, with the caveat that you must keep them powered all the time. Having a bunch of repeaters drop offline will cause fits with your mesh stability.
How are you getting your Hue bulbs into pairing mode? My new ConbeeII stick doesn’t see them. I tried connecting to them with the Bluetooth app and then doing a factory reset, no luck.