Finally we find out what the failure was
To save you going 5 min into the video… He was using an adapter with zigbee2mqtt that was listed as experimental.
It is less about the network adaptor and more that
he switches from zha to zigbee2mqtt withthe skyconnect / homeassistant adaptor that is still not fully supported in zigbee2mqtt.Using a coordinator more central to your network can help but as long as a large number of your powered relay devices have a strong connection there isn’t anything wrong with using the USB ones.
The ONLY issue with the USB ones is that it is recommended you put them on an extension cable as the USB port it self can cause interference, and putting a little distance from the antenna helps.
So his solution DOES all that, and is a good solution, but I wouldn’t just go toss your USB stick in the bin…
He was always using Zigbee2MQTT, but he switched from a Sonoff to the Sky Connect and that’s coupled with his dongle placement caused his issues.
He opens the video with “over the years I have used ZHA and Zigbee2mqtt” so I made a little assumption. but that makes it worse if he was already using Zigbee2mqtt when he picked up the Sky Connect and didn’t check compatibility.
Interesting to see that I have pretty much the same (apparently wonky) setup with my ZigBee coordinator plugged into my Home Assistant mini-PC (via extension cable) in the basement of my house.
Though I have a better supported adapter (from Slaesh) it is definitely not in the middle of the house. It works fine so far with about 100 devices and it seems the backbone is strong enough so the basement location is not a big problem. Still I wonder if the mesh could be improved by getting a network-enabled adapter and placing it somewhere more central.
I just switched to the SLZB-06. I placed it in the middle of all Zigbee devices to a power connector and it is working over Wifi. Coming from an odd TI CC2531 that was crashing every 24 hours, doing software updates, change to the Sky Connect, that was not working with 5 of my 6 Tuya Plugs, reusing the CC2531 for them an booting the HA Pi every 24 hours.
Now everything works fine with the SLZB-06. The setup was fast and flawless, the Zigbee devices forming a better network and the Philips bluetooth bulbs not described as zigbee devices are working over zigbee with it.
If you are using a supported NON experimental adaptor / chipset and you have powered devices with strong connections to it, you should be fine. The only optimization I would do is put your USB stick on an extension cable and get it a little ways away from the computer as when they are jacked directly into a pi/computer the USB port can actually cause a little interference.
