Zigbee ZHA using SONOFF Dongle Plus MG24, horrible LQI/RSSI

[dull pulsar]

This is my first post on Discord for HA. Yes, I am pretty new at home assistant. However, not entirely with home automation. I have been trying to migrate all of my Hubitat Zigbee devices into HA and be as stable as they were in Hubitat, but it seem to be an impossible task.

I have 45 devices, bulbs, roller shades, temp sensors, outlets, and more. I have the cordinator in HA and decided to use ZHA and added the Sonoff direcly as the instructions said. Using it alone and letting all the newly paired devices (mostly router capable) determine their best route path is simply not working. I have tried moving stuff around, even bought 5 new Third Reality outlets to act as repeaters/routers to help distribute better. It hasn't helped.

I haved tried 'Add a device via this device'. I have factory reset thing all sorts of steps to make the mesh more stable. Ok, enough background.. Now into my desperate act. I asked AI, and was led down a fantastic journey into the rabbit hole. The end conclusion is that my Sonoff MG24 is using the wrong radio type is : "ezsp" and it needs to be reconfigured over to "ember".

This led me into another whole world of pain trying to follow readding it to use ember. I use a MiniPC running proxmox and the AI has concluded that the SONOFF MG24 is disconnecting because the dongle is drawing too much power for the USB port to handle and said I need to buy a powered USB hub and use that to connect the dongle into the proxmox host.

Is this a possiblity that there is too much current being drawn for the USB port to handle ? I'm also skeptical of then need to go through all this to change the radio type from ezsp to ember. Please anyone with some knowledge and some guidance would be so very much appreciated.

[pastel fog]

It sounds like you're somewhat confused, or looking at the wrong documentation. The "ember" and "ezsp" drivers are only relevant for zigbee2mqtt, not for ZHA

usb power issues are pretty unlikely... but interference from usb ports (if you have the zigbee dongle plugged into a usb3 port) is pretty likely. Using a USB-2 hub or extension cable to move the dongle away from the USB3 port often helps to improve signal strength.

Another thing to check would be whether the channel you're using for zigbee might have interference from 2.4ghz wifi networks.

[clever hinge]

As @pastel fog has mentioned already. Adding an extension lead may help the situation along with checking channel congestion and ensuring the radio is more than 25cm(2 wavelengths at 2.4ghz) away from other 2.4ghz radios.

[dull pulsar]

Thank you both for replying.

The SONOFF MG24 includes a 1 meter extension cable which I am using. The question over Radio Type (ember vs ezsp) was soley introduced by the AI, in which I was searching for information about the ZHA integration specifically. It was presented in a google search via Gemini. I suppose, not knowing it was false or rather misdirected information and that it presented all comments with ZHA this, check ZHA that, only if you reached out to verify, aka this post, would one know if this were valid.

The powered USB hub recomendation, was introduced by the AI when errors occurred on my Proxmox host via dmesg log:

[26142.237412] usb 1-4: new full-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
[26142.365756] usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=10c4, idProduct=ea60, bcdDevice= 1.00
[26142.365774] usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[26142.365776] usb 1-4: Product: SONOFF Dongle Plus MG24
[26142.365777] usb 1-4: Manufacturer: SONOFF
[26142.365778] usb 1-4: SerialNumber: 380a5d5c35a1ef1187ef906661ce3355
[26142.367950] cp210x 1-4:1.0: cp210x converter detected
[26142.369678] usb 1-4: cp210x converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[26143.069195] cp210x ttyUSB0: cp210x converter now disconnected from ttyUSB0
[26143.069712] cp210x 1-4:1.0: device disconnected
[26143.289870] usb 1-4: reset full-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd

The explaination given was the USB port was disconnecting due to a power drain from the SONOFF MG24 antenna power requirements.

As for Channel assignments. I have Zigbeen on Channel 25 and 2.4G wifi on Channel 1, which from all accounts seems to provide the best seperation.

Would you perhaps respond to the log details and if these concerns of the device being disconnected are valid?

[pastel fog]

when the usb device is passed through to the vm, it gets disconnected from the host system, so it's normal to have a log like that printed once when the VM starts.

if it's printed multiple times, the most likely cause is just a bad usb cable; a power issue is very unlikely if it's plugged directly into a usb port on a pc.