For those of you that have been following this journey to create an extremely large Zigbee network, I wanted to share some of the key details with you on how this has been possible.
I want to thank @bgreet for introducing me to @tube and the TubesZB product line. After discussion, I convinced Tube to make me a MGM24 based coordinator for this experiment and he sent me two of them based upon the 7.4.0.0 firmware for EZSP. Moving to ZHA, and these devices have been stellar for my network and this project. These devices have just gotten into stock at the tubeszb.com website and I highly recommend.
In addition to that coordinator, I have a tweak to the zigpy configuration options in ZHA that can be made in configuration.yaml:
This should allow for the device to store all the neede source routes for the network and this new device has more memory than the MGM21 devices allowing for more freedom. In addition to this setting, I tend to disable entities of Zigbee items that I am not using, so disable LQI, RSSI, and the power monitoring items of the Inovelli switches. It is data that is not important to my use case and I am doing my best to limit traffic to the devices.
I love adaptive lighting, but you still need to be careful about broadcast messages and overloading the network. The adaptive lighting group should have an update to help make sure to not overload Zigbee networks, but you can do some manual work in how you group lights to overcome it currently.
I will add additional small details as we finish up over the next few weeks and hope to add a final visualization with over 400 devices on the Zigbee mesh. But I will say, if you get the MGM24 coordinator and some good devices, you should be great to 250 without any tweaking. Happy to provide my feedback/suggestions as time permits if you want to share here at all.
If you have found this post valuable, and wanted to Buy Me a Coffee, that would be stellar, but I am just happy to share my experiences with a community that looks to grow capabilities and the love of proper home automation and control.