Zigbee and Deepsleep -> Whats the best way?

[MeisterQ]

I want to build a battery powered device.
If i look on other devices like different TRVs, they act like they are "awake". They receive commands instantly, but they are batterypowered. So probably asleep.

I need a device, which will sleep, and if it receives a command (this could be delayed afew ms -s) it will turn on a relay, and go to sleep.
The best way is to put it in deep sleep, but then it will always loose its connection to the network i guess and need more time to go back to sleep.

Im having a custom PCB which is optimzed for deepsleep and only consumes afew uA while sleeping with a ESP32-C6.

if someone got an idea or maybe if there is an example. this would be great.

[P-R-O-C-H-Y]

Hi @MeisterQ, there is a deep sleep Zigbee example: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/tree/master/libraries/Zigbee/examples/Zigbee_Temp_Hum_Sensor_Sleepy

It's working really well, but deep sleep device is mostly usable only for devices like sensors, that are reporting data in some time cycle, like every 30s or minute. By that the battery life will strongly increase. The downside of deep sleep is, that you cannot awake the device by a command over the Zigbee network. For that a light sleep must be used, which cannot be supported in the Zigbee library, as its requires custom ESP-IDF sdkconfig options. So for light sleep device with a wake-up feature, I will suggest you to go for ESP-IDF with the esp-zigbee.sdk directly.

[MeisterQ]

Thank you for your reply. So, a real "sleeping" device is not possible with arduino ide? Will it follow up in future?

[fichtenmoped82]

Hi,

same here. It seems to me, that there is no way currently, to remain connected over deep/light sleep cycles - if using the Arduino IDE.

Every call of Zigbee.begin() creates a new "Device announced itself"-message in my IOBroker smarthome Zigbee implementation.

Or is there a potential way using light sleep or other options @P-R-O-C-H-Y ?

[P-R-O-C-H-Y]

Light sleep is not currently possible using Arduino core and the Zigbee library. For that functionality you need to use the esp-zigbee-sdk directly with ESP-IDF.

However I have no issues using deep-sleep and remaining connected to the network. If the device was already commissioned and connected to the network, after reboot the Zigbee.begin() will restore the saved network and will rejoin.
I haver many deep-sleep devices running without any issues on HA - ZHA (Z2M also works).