to help you, screenshots of my NOUS plugs
I had tried removing a sensor’s battery and putting it back, thinking it might pick the bridge at startup, but no — good to know. I’ll do that, thanks everyone for your answers 
I’m skeptical.
My main dongle is in the basement, two outlets on the ground floor. I re-paired an open/close (contact) sensor on the ground floor and the diagram seems consistent.
However the received signal remains at the weakest on the Gladys interface
The MQTT interface indicates an LQI of 116, but I’m not really sure how to interpret that value. I read that above 60 is pretty good but Gladys apparently doesn’t interpret it that way
Is there a link to « force » here toward the 220V outlets?
How do you interpret the dotted lines vs the solid lines on the diagram?
Thanks for your help
Yes, don’t worry too much about the level Gladys indicated.
An LQI of 116 is more than enough! 
Memoirs of a home automation newbie… 
Occupational reflex oblige, I tend to check the tarmac ten times before driving cars over it… we’ve just deployed 250 access points in an industrial environment to ensure good 5 GHz coverage so I wanted to understand. How can you trust an installation whose logic you don’t understand? 
So I dug through about ten sites on MQTT mesh networking and if there’s one point everyone agrees on, it’s that nobody really agrees… you read a bit of everything and its opposite.
Roughly I take away
- that with an LQI (Link Quality Indicator) above 35 everything is fine, and sometimes even an LQI of 5 can allow a device to function normally.
- Also that the mesh is automatic, that it can take hours to stabilize, that it’s counterproductive to tell a device to attach to a particular router, that preferably you plug in the plugs (network devices that forward the information) first and the battery-powered devices (non-routers) last, and that the protocol should do the rest.
- That, in general, the MQTT diagrams that illustrate a network are unreliable — this includes z2m (Zigbee2MQTT).
I’m also surprised that a plug only delivers an LQI of 15 at 3 m distance from a device in free space whereas the dongle easily exceeds 200 under similar conditions. If below 30 the signal is considered weak, one can legitimately question the usefulness of repeaters, or perhaps of this particular model?
I’ve had some false positives which I’ll for the moment blame on the supplied batteries that drain quickly and have a bad reputation. I see these false positives again when I reattach the devices, which suggests that the batteries might sometimes underpower the devices and cause them to reboot.
But I also note that if Gladys hadn’t shown me 1 bar out of 4 for an LQI that was more than sufficient at 110, I probably wouldn’t have asked so many questions. I therefore think the thresholds for the different reception levels should be reviewed so as not to mislead newcomers. 1 bar starting at 10 and 2 bars starting at 60, for example?
Always interesting to discover new protocols — looking forward to what’s next!
@Philou,
You need to take into account that if the mesh is automatic it is based both on battery-powered devices and mains-powered devices, and that it can happen that a low battery level on a battery-powered device may force devices that use it as a bridge to try to latch onto another device with a similar battery level or a mains-powered device that offers a similar power level…The ideal is therefore to pair plugs, bulbs, mains-powered switches, roller-shutter switches so that battery-powered devices do not act as bridges, this reduces battery wear and allows for a stable mesh network 
And indeed, plugging in everything that is mains-powered first and letting the network stabilize is the best way to do it and this allows you to see that the mesh is correct and that the repeaters have sufficient power levels, then you add the battery-powered devices.
Aside from the plugs, when I re-pair a device I can see the dotted links to the plugs (secondary routers), but as soon as I re-pair another device only the second one has the dotted links to the plugs — the first has « lost » them, at least according to the z2m map.
Also, I haven’t yet found where, in the details of the device that appears with these two dotted links, you can see those two links. It’s as if during network discovery to generate the map the protocol had access to information that it didn’t display afterwards.
Furthermore, I’ve never observed a link being formed outside of a pairing process. That might be related to the models I’m using as well.
Example: a sensor with dotted lines to two plugs, and a solid line to the coordinator. I unplug a plug, wait 5 seconds, replug it, refresh the map. It will never find the link to the previously unplugged plug. Maybe an option to enable on the device, or a firmware to update, or just the device models…
Sometimes the dotted links show an LQI of 0 on the map. How can an established link have zero reception?
I’ll keep digging
nice fireworks!
The thing is that at the very end… It doesn’t help that much because once your setup is all nice… You’ll buy new routers, new battery-powered devices… And it’ll be a mess again ^^
At my place I’ve stopped looking at the diagram (unless there’s a problem but I don’t actually have any) and I let it run however it wants
Ah well, it’s already a mess since I added the alarm last, because it’s battery-powered, but it turns out to be a router… I’ll come to terms with it in the end.
No kidding — there’s nothing else we can do here!
Did you invite Luke and the whole Star Wars gang into your living room @guim31?? Are you planning to take over all those planets?? 
Visually it’s pretty crazy ^^ 65 Zigbee devices!!
hello @guim31
I just came across your diagram, and I was wondering about the SonOff dongle
and if so have you modified it so that it can pick up 65 devices, because I think it only supports 40
Edit: formatting of the quote and reduction of the image size
Terdious
[quote=« Psoy, post:37, topic:6973 »]
*Edit: formatting of
Hi @Psoy, I have this dongle: https://tubeszb.com/product/zigbee-router/ + 2 repeaters of the same model.
According to the docs, I think that in theory I can pair a HUGE number of devices:
Z-Stack Router Firmware supports 50 Direct Children, 30 Neighbors and 100 normal routes
I’ve reached 35 devices connected with a Sonoff dongle, so I’ll probably see beyond forty. In any case thank you for your response , I wish you happy holidays