Hello,
I’m super new to Smartthings so might be missing something very basic. I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
I have a Smartthings Link plugged into an Nvidia Shield. The hub says it’s online. I have 8 Xiaomi Aqar door and window sensors in various areas of my house. All can be paired relatively easily from their doors and window locations using bsprangers device handlers, and they are work fine for about one hour. Then they become “unavailable” until I pair them again with the Smartthings Classic app. It doesn’t seem to be a range issue since all pair again with relative ease. I also have two wemo plugs and one wemo light switch that do not get disconnected from smartthings.
In some post somewhere I read that the problem may be that I’m using a Smartthings Link and buying a v2 hub would fix the disconnect problem. But now they have a cheaper v3 hub. Except I’m not sure if the v3 hub would fix the disconnect issue. Or maybe I need to get the Xiaomi hub? I have created a routine to work with Amazon Alexa to announce door/window openings and it works until it disconnects. I would like to keep this feature and the Xiaomi hub doesn’t work with Alexa, so I really would like to find a way to get these sensors to stay connected.
This is discussed at length in the thread about the DTH, so you should just talk to the folks there.
The short answer is that the standard requires that a zigbee Device check in with the hub every 60 minutes or it will be marked as missing. The Xiaomi devices Report right on the edge of that time period, so they are more vulnerable to being dropped.
On top of that, they appear to have difficulty working with many other ZHA repeaters. There are only a few that work well with them.
So the solution for most people has been to find one of the repeaters that does work well and add it where the Xiaomi devices will use it, which helps them report in a more timely fashion.
But ask the people in the following thread (this is a clickable link), as they are the ones with experience:
Unfortunately, Xiaomi’s Zigbee-based devices will not maintain a connection to a SmartThings Link for NVIDIA Shield, for the reason @JDRoberts explained.
They do work with the v2 hub (with mixed success reported by users, although I have never had problems personally). I have not read any reports of v3 hub users attempting to use Xiaomi devices, so I can’t answer that.
I can also confirm that many Zigbee repeating-capable devices will not allow Xiaomi devices to maintain a connection on a ST hub’s Zigbee mesh network. There are just two which are confirmed to work well: an XBee Zigbee module, and @iharyadi’s multi-function repeater solution device. Most mains-powered Zigbee devices besides smart bulbs will act as a repeater, so it gets tricky if have any of those and want to use Xiaomi devices as well, because there’s no control over what repeaters a Zigbee end device might connect to (which is part of the way a Zigbee mesh network is designed to work).
So if you want to instead connect your Xiaomi devices to a Xiaomi hub to avoid these issues, you’d need to integrate it with your SmartThings hub via virtual devices using this solution: