@ALERTua
Okay, I'm a home automation enthusiast from Kyiv, Ukraine. I am using my Xiaomi Gateway v3 with custom firmware from alexxit and it does not always work well, that's why I came here for your experience. Little did I know, there's a multi-protocol hub from a company from Ukraine! I spilled my tea onto my keyboard when I heard it from you, crying "WHAT?!" :D
@BobRed0965
Good information, but the best part was seeing someone else having the same debugging frustrations that I experience. Not just "This is the problem and this is what I did to fix it", but "I guessed this was the solution, then that, and then the other thing, and then I cried." Your comment about being glad your partner was away hit home too. I once made a rookie mistake and trashed my Home Assistant OS. It didn't take too long to fix, but I knew the Gods were smiling down upon me because my wife was away for the week! Had she been home, I would have misinterpreted every movement of her eyebrows as a criticism of my tech skills and manhood.
@digitaldistro
Your "WTF" was gold. I was exactly there a few months go.
@SmithyScotland
Thank you for being fully transparent by saying you bought this with your own money. I appreciate that.
@michaelsleen
Sounds painful, but valuable learning and troubleshooting for us all. Thanks for sharing. When I got started with Zigbee, I used a Conbee II and had loads of reliability issues. Then, I switched to a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Gateway, and I’ve never had a device drop offline since. Both gateways were in the same location in my house.
@hoodja
Thank you for this video. I've been struggling with a lackluster Zigbee setup for my three-story home (basements in the midwest US are important). I had the foresight to wire my house with CAT6 drops when we built it 10 years ago, and I also had a POE router racked up but not (yet) in use. Today I configured 4 SLZB-06Ms (1 coordinator, 3 routers) and deployed them across my house. After that, repairing all my battery-powered sonoff sensors was annoying, but the network seems much more stable (oh I also fixed the radio interference your video helped me discover with my 2.4GHz Unifi APs). Keep up the great and informative work!
@paulhewson7115
I bought this after your recomendation. What a Breath of fresh air this device is. EASILY updates firmware on devices as it is self contained and no flicking through HA. Had to watch a different video as I did not know how to set up Mqtt, and he had a SLZB-06. Thank you
@Jaw0lf
This was great for us to see. It doesn't matter how good you are at something, mistakes happen. But when they do, learning from them is the best thing.
@sebastiangeisel
I had the same issue. I am running ioBroker as smarthome system on a Synology under Docker. I used the Standard Zigbee Adapter with a USB Sonoff Stick. All of this placed in the Basement with a huge Zigbee Router Backend. Everything went well, then after a few weeks Devices start to become offline. Switching to the same SLZB-06 Coordinater placed in the first floor and using zigbee2Mqtt as Middleware solved all the issues and the Zigbee Network is now rock solid. I was also able to remove some routers that didn't had any function other than just stabilizing the Network and I do not have to play around with USB which is a mess on a Synology with docker.
@warpcode
It's amazing how every smart home youtuber I see pushes the usb coordinators. I didn't even know network coordinators existed until a couple of months ago
@Barnez2006
I switched from SONOFF Dongle-E with the SMLight-SLZB-06 POE and have been extremely happy. I did do a full reset including clearing off the device but that was in part to clear out other issues.
@MrDarkFreyr
This is perfect timing! In the past weeks I have been migrating my 100+ network from ZHA with SkyConnect to Z2M on a dedicated PI with some Sonoff Dongle E's as coordinators and routers. Everything was going great until earlier this week when the cascading disconnect started exactly as you described. Tears weren't far away either... I was considering splitting my network and running 2 instances of Z2M but this had drawbacks like pulling long USB cables as you described. This sounds muuuuch better! Thanks so much, you have made my life easier! As you I have a lot of Aqara H1 wired switches, I read in a few places that they are notoriously bad team players on non-Aqara Zigbee networks. Hopefully this coordinator will set them straight.
@bigantal
I like your content. I was excited to fix my Zigbee network with this SMlight device. I bought one from China, received it, didn't power on. Bought a second one. Same problem. Unfortunately it doesn't worth to send it back from Europe, so I'm left with two piece of junk. Reminding myself to be careful with Youtube recommendations in the future.
@mercuriete
Thanks for this video. I just bought that coordinator with Texas Instrument chip. I hope I learnt from your mistakes. Thanks for saving me time. :)
@drdonesomething
Thanks for giving away the answer in the first two minutes. Currently I've got about a dozen Wi-Fi smart home things, almost all of them Tasmota. Zigbee is my new project for battery powered devices and POE coordinators seem clearly the way. Love your videos, keep it up!
@checksumcharlieOLD
Glad it worked out! Though that truly sounds like the Skyconnect was the culprit, rather than the location of the coordinator. I’ve got a Sonoff coordinator located at the extreme end of a long apartment with ~70 devices and it is solid.
@RSayGV
At 8:20, it wasn't clear if this model from SMLight supported their advanced "IEEE address change". Supposedly that can make the switch pretty painless. Substituting coordinators instead of switching, so re-pairing is often not required.
@SuchByte
In my current setup, I use a Sonoff ZigBee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus which is plugged in to a Raspberry Pi3b on which I installed Zigbee2MQTT. This then connects over ethernet to the EMQX MQTT broker which is installed on my main server. I also did this because my main server is also in the basement and I also experienced connection issues. Now the Rasperry Pi is in the middle of the house and the main server still in the basement. Runs very well for a month now without any connection issues or delay.
@aeroflack
Great video! In my case i'm using ZHA with the sky connect dongle and it worked unstable and once or two time per day my zigbee network became unavailable and now i changed the protocol from the experimental zigbee/thread to just zigbee protocol and now it has been working fine and stable now.
@Ash-wb5zt