Ok, I’ve done a fair bit with wifi devices, now I’m waking up to zigbee.
Got myself an S26 R2 to play with, but just wanted to clarify a few things…
So, if I had a few of these around the house, would they form the man backbone of the zigbee mesh network? Or do they not provide that function?
And also - possibly n00b question - I presume there’s still a need / benefit to flash with esphome? Couldn’t see anything obvious on the site and only searched online for a few mins before giving up and asking for experience rather than random sites…
Ah, ok, so I need to have a few sockets near each other to prevent 1 being the mesh “gateway” and the inevitable network failure if someone disconnects it. I just presumed these things had a range similar to wifi.
Zigbee can have very good range depending on the products, but those outlets have poor range initially due to a bad antenna id guess, then they are plugged into an outlet, low to the ground, up against a wall, probably near lots of wiring and even grounded metal boxes in many cases. So it’s a bit of a worst case scenario for signal strength.
In homeassistant you should be able to go into the device page and pull up signal level information to see if you need to add or move devices to fix a deadspot.