[OBSOLETE] Original & Aqara Xiaomi Zigbee Sensors (contact, temp, motion, button, outlet, leak, etc)

[veeceeoh (Keith G)]

@lewiszhou

So at this time I have to make the conclusion that either zigbee devices have limited range, or more prone to signal blocking, or get interfered by wifi in neighboring house hold.

All of these things can be true, because Zigbee is a low-powered radio networking standard, and operates across the same bandwidth range as 2.4Ghz WiFi.

Besides changing your WiFi and/or Zigbee channel, the best way to avoid distance / interference issues is to use mains-powered Zigbee devices that can function as Zigbee repeaters.

If using Xiaomi devices, the only Zigbee repeater that I know of people having success with (including me) is an XBee module. I would recommend searching the forums here for “XBee” and also especially having a read through this thread:

Zigbee - from flakey to stable

I have been suffering from losing devices on an off, general instability… having only about 3 days of uptime before something stopped working. It annoyed me not knowing why… so i started to keep track of variables that were triggering it. The only thing i could pinpoint was if lots of people were in the house (with mobile phones), then bad stuff would happen. So, lets get more scientific. I bought an £11 xbee (actually £11 for 2)) a £3 usb converter and booted up XCTU, sketched together some settings from lots of other posts on xbee and connected it as a thing. I can now see my zigbee mesh… i can start to play. first thing i saw is lots of mobile devices = lots of intereference. What i saw was a marginal mesh at best, very weak signal between the hub, and the outlet, and pathetic signa…