Is there a smart-app that creates a signal meter from a z-wave device? I’d love to have something that puts all my devices into a bar graph showing their signal strength to the hub around the house.
I had signal issues the last few days, and I figured out why. I have Windows Media Center handling my TV, so my garage tv box connects to the router via wifi. TV is CRAZY and steady bandwidth. With the extra sustained bandwidth I had trouble adding some Iris door sensors I had just purchased. After resetting the sensors, and doing all sorts of hoop jumping to get it to work, I finally pulled the ST hub and put it in the middle of my family room. Worked fine. Keep in mind, the ST hub was always plugged in to a gigabit network.
It doesn’t make sense. Why would 2.4 and 5ghz affect it? At any rate, an easy way to capture signal data would be extremely helpful.
good idea for a signal list/app - good post. I’m not aware of an existing app. I used to see signal level “lqi” for some devices via the smartthings IDE login . https://graph.api.smartthings.com/device/list
but now I don’t see ANY lqi readings. Perhaps there was a downgrade.
zigbee is in the 2.4ghz band. Wireless routers and I think even microwave oven can interfere with zigbee. 5ghz probably has no effect. Zwave is something like 908.Xmhz in US - not sure if any common devices would interfere with Zwave.
I would check what zigbee channel the SmartThings hub is using (hub page) to see if the frequency of that channel overlaps with your wifi channel (check your router settings). I do not believe there is a way to change the zigbee channel on the hub so if they overlap I would change the wifi channel on your router.
Some routers allow for wider channels (I believe 40MHz) so the picture above will not be accurate in that case but you can still figure out whether they overlap. Of course, it would be ideal to avoid overlapping neighboring wifi networks otherwise you might resolve your zigbee interference issue and gain wifi interference issues. Some routers, and many apps both for computers and phones, will show you a graph of all networks and the channels they are using. The height of the curve used to represent the channel will indicate the intensity of the signal.
Edit: Just saw a nice article going into further detail linked in the post above mine:
