Interesting to see that I have pretty much the same (apparently wonky) setup with my ZigBee coordinator plugged into my Home Assistant mini-PC (via extension cable) in the basement of my house.

Though I have a better supported adapter (from Slaesh) it is definitely not in the middle of the house. It works fine so far with about 100 devices and it seems the backbone is strong enough so the basement location is not a big problem. Still I wonder if the mesh could be improved by getting a network-enabled adapter and placing it somewhere more central.

Looks like you were pretty spot-on!

The reveal will be interesting 🙂

I wonder what his big ZigBee issue was that took him months to solve.

From the vague description it could be that his ZigBee stick was plugged directly into the USB port instead of using a USB extension cable, thus subjecting the ZigBee stick to all sorts of RF interference from the motherboard.

Or maybe the USB pass-through to the home assistant VM was wonky?

Edit: he talks about getting 30$ worth of hardware to fix the issue so it is probably not just a USB extension cable 🤔