Presence Sensor suddenly started Away/Home/Away/Home

Many people have problems with the zigbee presence sensors getting lost from the network. And there are all kinds of things that can cause that.

But here you’ve got a single device of several with a poor RSSI and a really poor LQI. That’s almost always either interference or a bad radio.

I’ve had a fob configured each way setting 3 meters away from the hub for a few weeks. The one that detects on zigbee connect status flips present non-present a few times a day. The battery status transmitting zigbee fob never wavers. I’m using a missed message tolerance of 150 seconds (2.5 minutes) I’m still testing battery life. I wouldn’t have thought of using the battery life message if an engineer at one of the manufacturers hadn’t told me that it’s far more reliable to do it that way. Totally independent of hub manufacturer.

Makes sense. You’re going to lose some battery life, but it could be worth it. (Battery check does 3 things: receive message, check battery, send message–vs do just one thing and sending the ping. So I know you’ve doubled the check in period, which helps, but it still’s somewhat more energy-intensive. But again, might be worth it for some households.)

People who are using it to open a garage door, though, may not like having to wait twice as long to be recognized. But again, choice is good. :sunglasses:

The messages are transmitted once a minute now, with the 2.5 minute tolerance – but that can be reduced even further. Hard wiring one into car power for the garage door…would mean battery life wouldn’t be an issue even if you set it for 30 seconds or less.

Pretty sure it’s not interference as said the other 4 fobs would be affected also, but these never miss a beat when placed in the same vicinity of the fob that is misreporting, that fob however isn’t flip flopping away home quickly like every few minutes as was the issue with presence sensors a little while back as I goes offline for about 10 minutes.

But what I find strange is when I reboot the hub the presence sensor that has the issue the reports a lqi of 100% for roughly 4 hours then it start flip flopping again. And when you look the lqi is showing as dropped.

So why would rebooting the hub fix an issue with the fob temporarily. This is consistent I have reproduced this 4 times now. Reboot the hub and he issue goes away temporarily for about 4 hours

A lot of zigbee devices are flaky right now with exactly this kind of behavior. Motion sensors that will report temperature but not motion, contact sensors which appear stuck at either open or close, pocket sockets that become unresponsive. Removing from the network and re- pairing or even just taking out the batteries and putting them back in Will fix the problems for a few hours and then they return. So maybe this is related to that? It’s really hard to tell right now. None of it makes any sense, but it’s definitely happening.

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hi @Fuzzyligic,
This is unrelated to your issue. How did you view the lqi and rssi of your devices? Thanks.

go into the devices view in the IDE and select your device. the rssi and lqi are visible under the state section of the device.

ok so i have a question, does the Zigbee channel on the hub change or is it static? reason i ask is that i am pretty sure it was using channel 23 when i first ran through my setup (i wrote down these value) i had ST on channel 23, Hue on 25, and my 2.4ghz Wifi on with 40mhz spacing in the area below channel 6 which i thought was good separation. i have 2 neigbour wifi signals which are very weak just on the edge of reception on channels 11 & 12, but i can only pick them up from my WIFI router near the front of the house, and that has a good external antennae attached, so i am pretty sure that they could not be causing interference as i cant even see those networks from any tablet or laptop in my house.

so i bought a new fob and immediatly after adding this fob, another of the fobs that wasn’t having a problem started flapping with the same issue…?!? so i went and checked my Zigbee channel on my hub and saw it’s set to 15? this directly conflicts with my WIFI. this was not the case in December when i first set this up i am pretty sure as i did write the values down

so did this change? or was i mistaken (i very much doubt this), looking through this community i cant find any info except from old info regarding v1 hub which said the channel was set at the factory and cannot be changed, but i cant see anything on v2, it is intimated it is changeable on the hardware, but we as users have no exposure to do so. so how could this have changed?

so i’ve just changed my Wifi to channel 13 with the 20mhz extension channel below… Hue on Channel 11 and ST on Channel 15, so i will see now if the issue persists

@duncan can you shed some info on this?

Ok so it seems I must have been mistaken as I have a post in Jan on the community post firmware update at the end of Jan where it was showing as channel 15 also. So I have no Idea why I wrote down that channel and configured my wifi to conflict. But my Zigbee network has been working well.

So now I the two fobs that were flapping before the frequency change are still flapping so buying a new fob has made the situation worse :frowning:

For some reason, I am not seeing it. Am I at the right place >>

You are in the right place but the ST motion sensor doesn’t report this state. Only the presence sensor

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Thank you. My bad, this is clear to me now.

The zigbee coordinator in the ST hub is randomly assigned a ZHA channel at the factory and cannot be changed after that. ( this is why Hue bulbs connected directly to the ST hub can get stuck as they may not be on a ZLL channel and can’t be recognized by other ZLL devices.)

BTW, Duncan is a zwave engineer, not zigbee. @slagle can probably get you an answer if you still need one.

It is static, for now.

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i don’t particularly, i must have been mistaken or tired when i originally wrote down the channel it was using. i did shift stuff around to ensure they didn’t conflict with that channel.turns out i had the wrong one and they were conflicting :slight_smile: but the hub and wireless are at opposite ends of the house as i had cat5 wired through all the rooms so i’m not tethered to the wireless router like a lot of people. thing is, zigbee was working well, zwave was where i was having all the issues recently until i removed all music player devices from ST, now that part is right my Zigbee goes down the pan, i just cant catch a break :frowning:

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correction, i put my door lock on silent mode because the stupid voice telling me the door was unlocked and locked over and over again. just checked again and both fobs that were reporting issues are now working by the looks of it and have been for the last 3 hours…will keep monitoring it.

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I’ve started getting them constantly this afternoon.

• lqi: 100 %
• rssi: -61 dBm

just one of my two arrival sensors.

driving me nuts!!!

I got min fixed by moving all my wifi and Hue Zigbee channels, however after the change I was using Wifi Channel 13 with the Extended 20mhz below but a wireless webcam and my lifx stuff dropped of the network, turns out they cannot connect to wifi channel 13 :frowning: to get around this I am using Wifi channel 10 with the 20mhz above and I am using Hues on Zigbee Channel 11 and my ST hub is on Channel 15, this fixed it for me, but I still have no idea why it started suddenly just on one of the sensors.

Symptoms I’m having are similar but I never see the lqi dip below 100%. Even in the same room as the hub with lqi at 100% and rssi at -40 it still does it. No wifi in the room only downstairs on the other side of the house. Hue hub located over there too. Obviously I have hue bulbs and other zigbee devices around the house.
How do you look up the zigbee channel the hub is using and how does that compare to the channels used by standard 2.4 wifi? Would like to see if I can optimize in a similar way.
It works fine for weeks on end then suddenly has a hissy fit. Very annoying.