this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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Are there longer range zigbee extenders? I would like to avoid having to find places for a bunch of smart plugs across the house to extend the signal.
Wouldn't wifi battery operated buttons need batteries replaced all the time, isn't that one of the reasons for something like zigbee, the low power usage?
You can put a coordinator in relay mode and use that, the antenna would help with the range. Get one of those outlets with USB and a right-angle cable and it'll be nice and low profile too.
If it's in relay mode, does it only need power via USB or does it still need to be plugged into a server? I don't have any nearby devices to plug it into, I'd probably need to get some mishmash of USB charger and adapter to plug in the coordinator and power it, if it can't reach straight from my HA server all the way to where I want to put the button.
Yeah, it shouldn't need anything more than USB power, it's just another node in the mesh at that point. If you don't have one of those USB outlets just use a phone brick, that should be enough.
EDIT: See THIS for more info. While that's obviously written for Z2M some of it applies to other coordinators.
Sweet, I'll have a think of where I could put one. Any idea of range for ones that have an antenna?
The product page for the sonoff dongle says 40-50 meters line-of-sight but it'll depend on your walls and wifi interference.
Oh cool, thanks. None of the ones I looked at showed range info that I could see. It has to travel through a few walls, but I'm sure one will do the job with the right placement.
With an extender, it's essentially a second coordinator. But it's worth mentioning that a good Zigbee network is full of routing devices, so your network should be pretty far reaching anyway.
If the button you want to set up is far away from everything else, then WiFi or Bluetooth are definitely worth considering, because it is better to change batteries more often than be forced to add a bunch of devices to get one to work.
Isn't the point of Matter that you can do this sort of thing? Have a separate zigbee network connection via a bridge that uses wifi? Is it worth using yet?
There's matter over WiFi and Matter over Thread, I've not heard of matter over Zigbee. The reason I mention it is because Matter is just how the things talk to each other, not how they talk to each other. Think like Spanish, over the Phone. Spanish being Matter. Your Sky Connect can already listen for via WiFi.
From all I've watched, Matter is still very rare and prone to dropouts.
My issue is that I have some devices near my skyconnect, and that works fine. But now I basically want a second zigbee network for the smart button and plug.
My understanding is that Matter solves this by allowing you to use a zigbee bridge. The bridge connects to zigbee to talk to the button/switch, and talks to home assistant over wifi (using the Matter protocol). That way you don't have to have the zigbee network continuous. I was watching part of Home Assistant's live steam the other day that explained it a little.
I guess it's still very early for Matter, so probably my best bet is to either extend the zigbee network or get a wifi button (or wait until Matter is more mature).
Thanks for the help 🙂