Had some time today, So here is an update of what I learned / figured out. I am making a few assumptions becasue I don’t understand the Xbee radio enough yet to know for sure.
Today I configured a new radio to connect to Smartthings to use as a way to monitor the status of the other radio I had previously configured. My first issue was the normal getting it to show up in smartthings as a thing all by itself with no interaction on my part. After tinkering with it I figured out my error. I had Parameter AO set wrong for my firmware. The correct setting was option 7 Explicit+ZDO. I knew that was the noun name of what I wanted but for some reason I got stuck on the settings I saw others using and selected the wrong one. After correcting that the radio would join smartthings as a thing all by itself. Soooo progress made!
Issue number 2 was the problem when I would plug the USB adapter the radio was mounted in into a standard USB power supply. The radio would never associate itself to smartthings and join the mesh. My associate led on the adapter would stay solid blue. The fix for this was yet another parameter set wrong. I had parameter D6 set to option 1 (Rts flow control) The correct option is the default of 0 (disabled). When this is set right the radio will connect like it is supposed to as soon as you power it up.
Here is a list of the settings I changed from the default. Most of them have been shown in previous discussions in various threads.
ZS = 2
NJ = 5A
NI = whatever you want to call the device I used Xbee1 and Xbee2
NO = 3
EE = 1 (Enabled)
EO = 1
KY = 5A6967426565416C6C69616E63653039
AP = 2 (API enabled with escaping)
AO = 7 (Exlicit+ZDO)
D8 = 0 (Disabled)
Be aware these numbers are going to move around and be in different places depending on the firmware you use. So connect to your radio in XCTU, update to latest firmware, and change your settings.
So after that I placed the repeater in my shed and let my current iris motion sensor connect to it. You can see it here in the XCTU scan. The XBee radio is green and the Iris motion sensor is blue.
I watched for activity repports in smartthings to make sure everything was talking. So far so good so I decided to see if my path to the coordinator (smartthings hub) was good by adding a second Iris motion sensor while I was in the shed.
It connected fine and was found by the hub fairly quickly. You can see it in this XCTU scan. The new sensor is blue the repeater is green. The original motion sensor is right below the new one in the scan.
The sensors were both talking to the hub as is evident by the reports in my activity log.
The only thing I yet don’t understand and it really doesn’t matter is when I do an XCTU scan from the XBee in the house it doesn’t show the 2 Iris sensors connected to the Xbee radio in the shed? The green item is the Xbee in the house and the blue item is the Xbee in the shed. Notice it shows no endpoints connected to it. When you do the scan from the Xbee in the shed it does show the endpoints as evidenced in the image I posted above.
Another interesting item is the radio in the shed chooses to connect to an Iris wall plug that is upstairs (directly above) my repeater. Even if I join them to the hub in the house they almost always pick the repeaters in the upstairs of my house vice the hub. My assumption is the signal strength is slightly better to that repeater as my upstairs is wood and drywall. Downstairs there is an extra layer of brick and possibly 1 extra wall.
Possibly if you need to get your signal outside, depending on house construction, it might help to put a repeater upstairs if outside is not available?
So there you go, I am going to continue to monitor the motion sensors for activity and see if my connection stays active. I’ll post an update in a week or so about if it keeps working or not.