this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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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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I'm starting to replace some wifi devices with zigbee too, Yes many zigbee devices will act as a repeater or router for other devices to connect through, the only devices that tend not to have this functionality are battery powered devices like pushbuttons or remotes.
Just a word of warning, those S26 Zigbee outlets have quite poor range so you might still run into issues if you only have a couple of them.
As far as I know there is no alternative firmware for the Zigbee and Z-wave devices. nor is there any real need for one as they do tend to "just work" but that also means you are stuck with the features and functions they give you. There are some Zigbee bridges that can run ESPhome to add some customisability, but that is just for the wifi side of the device.
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.