The ZigBee network map is well done and I can see at once how it’s all connected. It’s even live and I can see new devices connecting themselves.
For my taste it’s a bit hard to reach. From the ‘home page’ it takes 6 mouse clicks to reach it, and the clicks are on different places on the screen, so I have to look where I click. I would greatly love to add it to my ‘favorites’ screen.
I see two cosmetic issues. One is that in the legend the German column titles are too wide and overlap:
The other is that some of the thing’s names are overlaid by their graphics. This makes the map a bit hard to read. The workaround is, of course, to click on the things. But this makes understanding the map less intuitive.
I don’t think I really understand all that’s shown in the map. For instance, there’s the device called maRepeater. The legend says it’s a neighbour to scRepeater. Yet the legend for scRepeater says maRepeater is a boss (‘Übergeordnet’).
Both are repeaters and they’re located in adjacent rooms. So: can I remove scRepeater without disturbing the network or can I not?
I think I need some more instructions on how to read that map.
It is true that the Network map is buried quite deep down in the settings… It’s a hard balance between providing features accessible and not overloading the user interface. I suppose the map could be moved a level up but I’d argue that it’s not important enough to provide a dashboard widget for it because in practice one doesn’t need this feature ever except if there’s a problem in the network. And even then only a couple of times until that’s resolved. Of course, it looks pretty cool and it’s nice to look at (I’ve been there) but also that will stop and you’ll get bored
Thanks for reporting the overlapping german translations. I’ve fixed that.
Strange that the name label in the map overlap that much for you… This is how it looks for me
I can only guess that this may be because of some display/font scaling differences on various platforms. May I ask on which platform you took that screenshot? Did you change the font size or any other display scaling options in the system settings of the operating system?
Now, for the content of the map, it’s somewhat magic indeed. All the information shown is obtained directly from the ZigBee network. ZigBee provides network commands to read the link quality tables from each device as well as their neighbor tables. So nymea uses those two commands in order to get all that information and paints that map from that. How a packet is routed in the end, is something that the devices decide for each packet they send (well. perhaps that’s implementation specific to the device). If you click a device the map will paint a path (if it’s able to resolve one) between the nymea coordinator and the device. That’s the path nymea would use when sending a packet to the device. Doesn’t necessarily mean the return path would be the same though, also doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a static route. It may be changed by the ZigBee stick at any time before sending the next packet. ZigBee is rather dynamic when it comes to figuring out how to send packets in the network. If an end device reports a router node as parent, it will most likely send all its packets to that parent node though.
Looking at the full map, it doesn’t seem that any clients are are reporting ScRepeater as their direct parent, so yes, I’d say it’s save to remove that without introducing any issues at all. That said, even if there were some devices linked to it, unless it’s one of those buggy Aqara devices, it will try to find a new parent and hop over to that. It may appear disconnected for a couple of minutes while finding a new parent though. So, in the end, as long as there are other router nodes within decent signal strength reach of an end device, you are free to add and remove zigbee devices and the network always “heal” itself as much as it can.
The devices with overlapping names in my map are all near five o’clock (or in the south-easterly direction from the center). Yours does not show any devices in that direction.
My app runs in Ubuntu Linux 22.04.2 LTS and I haven’t changed anything in the installation of Nymea:app. I don’t think I have any special fonts, either. The app says it’s version 1.8.0, but 1.7.0 looked exactly the same.
I did not rescale the picture of my map in any way, yet it is much smaller than yours in terms of pixels.
I have spent the last few weeks staring at that map and the corresponding maps of other products, trying to attain a stable network. This is why I’m using this tool at the moment quite frequently. I certainly hope that the network now keeps its current shape and that it stops dropping devices each day.
The map remains the same in Android, Windows and Ubuntu Linux. KüHeizung has moved from EsRepeater to KüRepeater and its label is now completely unobscured.
Well, it’s not a big deal and certainly no showstopper.
Right… my suspicion is that the distance between end device nodes is relative to the diameter of the router circle… so if you have only a few routers but a lot of end devices, they’ll be closer to each other… Seems like something that can be fixed…
