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    recommend zigbee door sensor

    Just ordered the Nortek interface to help solve a couple of issues.
    One issue is the Z-wave door sensor at my mailbox is very intermittent since its about 100ft away - clear Line of sight. Looking to replace with a zigbee since the range is "supposedly" much better. Any recommendations for the sensor I should use?

    Thanks,
    Jeff

    #2
    I have a z-wave ecolink door/window sensor at my mailbox (it is inside a waterproof plastic box on the post outside of the mailbox) at about the same distance. I put a ZW117 (latest at the time) repeater in a inside window frame that is closest to the mail box inside my house and as inline to the controller as I could get it. Being that z-wave has a better range than zigbee it works for me every time. So might consider trying a z-wave repeater first.

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      #3
      Agree with what cowinger said, both z-wave and zigbee both rely on having a dependable mesh network in place. Zigbee battery devices are even more temperamental and absolutely need intermediate routers (a zigbee term for fully powered nodes) to help the long distance battery endpoints.

      Is your current Z-wave door sensor a regular Z-wave or Z-wave Plus? Might want to acquire a Z-wave plus version to increase its effective range.

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        #4
        Thanks cowinger and TC1 . I have a couple of repeaters so I'll try moving one to a window frame close by and will pick up a newer sensor with Z-Wave Plus.

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          #5
          I can confirm that 100 ft line of sight with zigbee xiaomi door/window sensor has a very low link strength at the receiver. Most of the time the open/close status was not received. I had used Radio Shack Mail alert RF to receiver at the closest power about 100 ft away and then UPB IO module for the other 500 ft. The alert failed and I replace the setup with LoRa for the long haul and trenched power closer to the mailbox to support the zigbee sensor capability. Solar and battery would have been another option to trenching, but the wire seemed more straightforward.

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            #6
            Michael McSharry , sorry to divert, but what have you been using for LoRa devices? One of my colleagues brought up the LoRa term in conversation and it looks interesting. I can't find any off the shelf retail devices, looks like everything is still hobbyist/OEM stuff?

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              #7
              I have gone both routes. The plug'n'play version is the LoRa modem that has a RS-232 serial interface like https://www.ebay.com/itm/LoRa-Transc...Cclp%3A2334524

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              For tinkering I have been using ESP32 modules with LoRa chip such. The ones I have are a couple years old, but similar are like https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000...archweb201603_
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              All of my work has been point to point so have not got into the LoRa gateway for which there are also many off-the-shelf options such as those from RAK. For my ESP32 I use the USA-approved band of 915 Mhz. The modems are the China-approved 433 Mhz. Since I do only point to point anything on the ISM is legal. Antenna quality and line-of-sight is important for longer ranges. With the ESP32 modules and little antenna as shown in the picture I get a range of a 500 to 1000 ft in neighborhood setting where houses and stuff are in the line of sight. An antenna mount on the roof rather than just laying on the office desk should give better range.

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                #8
                Michael McSharry I just read your topic on "Mail notification via zigbee and LoRa" and scanned the MQTT plugin info. Interesting stuff. I haven't looked at LoRa at all until now. I'm going to try the easy way first (new Z-Wave sensor) then if that doesn't work (read "when that doesn't work") I'm thinking that the Radio Bridge Door sensor https://store.radiobridge.com/produc...-window-sensor transmitting to an ESP32 and using MQTT would work great. I have not done much programming since FORTRAN and BASIC days but sitting at the computer with a beer sure beats digging up my front lawn with a pick-axe to add a wired status sensor to my security system.

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