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I'm deeply confused. I have a shitload of Zooz stuff that supports Long Range. Does the whole star topology and everything. Is this some sort of new development? Or did the author miss the long range stuff that's been available for a year now?
EDIT: many commentors over on Ars are also confused.
KNX + zWave + esphome (especially when it gets matter support) will be the ultimate combo of reliability and flexibility!
KNX?
I read that and their website and still don't know what it is? It's neither hardware nor a protocol?
KNX is indeed a protocol, but there is a whole multi - manufacturer ecosystem around it. It is mostly used in the commercial space. It is literally the ultimate smart electricity ecosystem for reliability.
Everything that I did is done in the electrical box so you buy traditional push button switches for the walls with very thin, cheap cable, and then your lights as normal.
It is wired originally with twisted pair bus that delivers power and data. They branched out also into wireless products also now using 898MHz bands (same as zwave).
The protocol is very tightly regulated but everything is guaranteed to work. It isn't wireless so it doesn't have shitty mesh problems like zwave and ZigBee have with many devices. You don't get bad device behaviors and disconnects with power outages. There are no shitty batteries to replace (and no fibaro zwave devices having ridiculous battery drains when outside of a +/-10C range from 20C).
It will simply work and keep working for your lifetime, unlike many or most ZigBee and Zwave devices.
Unlike Starfighter says, It actually isn't that expensive for basic home users. if you do it correctly and don't go for "everything being LCD panels". It is much much cheaper than retrofitting every socket with ZigBee or zwave smart switches. I am fully stripping and renovating my house and it is literally about the same price as doing everything with modern teleruptors, with 10x the functionality. If you include the license, then maybe 10% more expensive.
It cost me literally 1400€ 32 switches, 16 circuits of on/off lights and fans (or I could use them for roll blinds), and 4 dimming circuits, plus temperature and humidity sensors to smartly turn on bathroom fans. It is €30 for every Shelly wave module which would be 1000€ just for the switches alone with no dimming or sensing. Plus if you are already rewiring you house, you get to save a shit ton of money using small gauge cable with potential-less contacts.
Don't get me wrong, zwave is great, but KNX is absolutely king at only a marginal price premium (for standard home users, commercial focused HVAC controllers and such are expensive as hell)
Edit: also one thing to note is that all UI elements of KNX through pretty much all the manufacturers look like they are from 2010 or earlier (and they often are). I much prefer other options or a Home Assistant tablet or something.
Damn, this is THE answer. I really appreciate you my dude.
Mostly its really fucking expensive. Usual applications are central control of heating and window blinds in large office buildings.
Part of what drives the price is that ideally it's all hard wired.
I'm still confused as to what the product is, that just sounds like commercial Home Assistant. What is hardwired? Some knx device similar to a Shelly?
It's a buildings automation standard. The products that implement it are usually expensive
Thanks, that sounds like a correct answer.
Maybe commercial MQTT? From the wiki it seems like mostly an intermediary protocol to get disparate things working on the same system. Their site is pure marketing garbage for explaining anything about it though.
Do the ZWave devices act as repeater as the ZigBee do?
Z-wave LR has no repeaters, it's a star topology. Regular old z-wave is a mesh, z-wave LR is not.
Depends on the device.
If it is AC powered, it acts as a repeater. If it is battery powered, it is only a node, not a repeater.
So, like ZigBee, thanks.
Zwave is my first choice for new devices. Love that I can just scan the little QR code, turn it on, and have it come up in HA. Super-long range, I'm going to have to look for outdoor sensors.
But I'm also thinking - my parents are starting to have health problems - that a mile could even be a family member or friend's house. Not as intrusive as cameras, but an easy way to see that they're up and about...making coffee, TV on, or whatever, and not (potentially) collapsed in the shower unable to get up.
I'd rather set up a point-to-point wireless link with directional antennas and exactly two base stations than rely on every little IoT device having long range. Better yet, such a link could be high-bandwidth and capable of handling things like data backups and Internet access failover.
LoraWAN
I'd be more inclined to trust LoRa for anything that needs that sort of distance.
I spent several weeks evaluating options and really wanted to use LoRa for controlling some stuff in a detached machine shop, but I just couldn't find reasonably priced sensors, switches, and gateways (or access points or whatever you call them in LoRa parlance). I seem to recall that one of the major integrations was cloud-polling only which was a huge no-go (same reason I didn't buy in heavily into Yolink, I require 100% local control).
Do you use LoRa? I'd love to hear what you use (brands and vendors to buy stuff from) if so. I try to have at least two different technologies controlling an area. That way, my zwave-js-ui pod occasionally shitting the bed won't completely break an area.
I've used the Heltec Lora v2 and v3 which are ESP32 devices and you can put ESPhome on them. The V2 are delicate little things and I'm pretty sure they're static sensitive, so if you get anything, get the V3. Of course, when they went V2 to V3, they didn't keep it pin compatible because fuck me, I guess. But I fixed that and now I'm on V3 devices. You can put an external 9 or 13 dBi gain antenna on these and I've gotten a few miles with them, LOS. I use these on pumping systems to communicate between the trough and pump on long pasture cattle watering lines.
If I want to go longer range or have some trees in the way, I've been using ebyte E32 standalone (UART) radios. You can get 25 miles out of those with good direction YAGI antennas, as they can run at 1W. I have an amateur radio license so I'm legal to use that power if I don't encrypt it, which is fine because all I'm doing with it is sending telemetry (gates, pumps, temperature) on the farm or between equipment for RTK correction on my AgOpenGPS units.
Sweet! Wonder what the use cases are with that kinda range. I guess if you own a lot of property it would be nice.
I’ve read Shelly has bad life expectancy. (Don’t know about alternatives)
@sit
Five year warranty on Pro devices https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=774868644853056&id=100069897832443&set=a.481097554230168
The warranty doesn’t include the worktime spent to fumble the Shellys out of the wall and back in.
In what way?
Read of a guy who fitted his house with them and had to replace about a third or half after 3-4 years
Edit: After looking up “Shelly life expectancy” I’ve read more people who lose after 3 years functionality
I've only ever had 1 Shelly go out on me and it's still installed. It's a 2.5 that stopped speaking wifi. It was set to detached mode to keep some hue bulbs powered. Now the physical switches are no use but it still works so I just left it for now.
Zigbee is a mess so this is great news
Why do you feel ZigBee is a mess?
Lack of certification leading to non-standard implementations that don’t work well with other devices and instability, especially Aqara
That's certainly fair. Some of the implementations are terrible, leading to the necessity of things like https://github.com/doctor64/tuyaZigbee
It's no wonder that ZigBee evolved into Matter
No idea what you're talking about: https://software-dl.ti.com/simplelink/esd/simplelink_cc13x2_26x2_sdk/3.30.00.03/exports/docs/zigbee/html/zigbee/product_certification.html
https://zigbeealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/07-4842-13-Zigbee-certification-policy.pdf
If you're complaining that the Zigbee standard is open and anyone can write their own implementation, you might be in the wrong place.
Don't buy non-certified Zigbee products. Simple as that.
Not the guy your asked, but I'd say everything proprietary is a mess, by definition.
ZigBee is an open standard
No it is not! It's a standard, but is by no means an "open" one. Use of it requires paying royalties to the Zigbee Alliance.
Is it? I thought that ZigBee was royalty free and Zwave was not (even because usually ZigBee products costs less than the Zwave ones); is it the other way around?
I believe that Z-wave is more open then Zigbee (although it didn't start out that way, and it's unclear to me whether it's completely so now or not).
Thread exists because it's meant to be the royalty-free replacement for both of them (and the first royalty-free standard since X10).
I just had a look at some Z-Wave motion detection sensor and I soon remembered why I chose ZigBee some years ago: they're soooo expensive! ZigBee sensors costs half/a forth of the Z-Wave ones!
Why that? Maybe for the more expensive royalty? More expensive components?
Disclaimer: I am wildly speculating as someone who has been been paying attention to smart home tech for a long time, but only minimally so because every time I checked it seemed too immature/janky/proprietary/etc. to bother dealing with. (It's only recently, with the advent of stuff like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Tasmota, and hopefully-imminent Matter and Thread, that I've started to dip my toes in.)
First of all, I feel like a decade ago Z-Wave used to be the cheaper option. Second, my impression is that Z-wave, as an older standard with questionable compliance/implementation accuracy across vendors, just didn't work quite as well as Zigbee, which I guess would make it less popular over time and therefore eventually more expensive due to fewer economies of scale.
Lolwut. Never had a single issue.
Me neither but it's good to hear of others experiences
Maybe it's just Sonoff products, but Zigbee has never been reliable for me, even for short distances and no walls. It just stops working, I go take the battery out of the device and it comes back.
I've got a bunch of cheap Tuya devices, they run like a dream. Maybe once a month I need to restart the bridge as a random device will play up. But that's it. Runs like a dream otherwise.