How does an end device decide how to connect?

[bartkummel]

Hi,

I have this outdoor motion sensor that is unreliable. It's a Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor, so it should be a quality device. One of the benefits of this particular sensor is that it shows with a LED that it has detected motion. And the color of the LED tells me whether it was able to deliver its message to the Zigbee network. If the LED lights up green, it was successful, if it lights up orange, it wasn't. (However, confusingly enough, sometimes the light still turns on after the LED blinked orange.)

When I paired the sensor, I enabled joining only for a specific LED controller, that is also outside, in a watertight box. It's the controller for the light stip that has to turn on when motion is detected, I thought that would make sense. It worked well for a while, but recently the sensor began being unreliable. The last couple of days, I haven't seen the LED light up green. And more often than not, the light doesn't turn on when there's motion. When I checked the network map today, I saw that the sensor is now connected to another router device. That might be the cause of the unreliable behavior. (The other device is roughly at the same distance from the sensor, so it makes kind of sense. However, it's a cheaper device, and it's hidden in a wall box. So I can imagine that it's less optimal to connect to.)

I'd like to have it connect to that LED controller. Of course I can remove it from the network and then pair again. However, apparently it's possible that devices choose to connect to another device by themselves. So, how does this work? And is there a way to force a device to always connect through a specific router device?