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It looks neat, but it's hard not to be cynical about yet another competing standard for low-power "smart home" / IoT-type devices, just to muddy the ZigBee vs.
by Kadin 11y ago
It looks neat, but it's hard not to be cynical about yet another competing standard for low-power "smart home" / IoT-type devices, just to muddy the ZigBee vs. Z-Wave vs. BT LE Longrange vs. conventional WiFi waters a bit more.
Not saying there's anything wrong with the protocol per se; it's probably perfectly fine. But the lack of widespread standardization in the 900MHz ISM low power space is really crippling what could otherwise be a robust market for smart devices. That's the key problem, rather than anything technical, and adding yet another option for hardware designers to choose from seems unlikely to improve things in the near future.
- rblatz 11y agoI agree, the wink hub already ships with something like 5 different radios. Also this doesn't look like it supports mesh networking. What advantages does it offer over z-wave or zigbee? And will it be better than Insteon's or Lurton's protocols?
- TD-Linux 11y agoIt supports IP, which is a nice benefit for interoperability and standalone usage (it doesn't require a "smart" hub that understands all of the protocols).
- rblatz 11y agoBut it does require a bunch of smart apps that can speak the language for each device you toss on the network.
- tilect1 11y agoLoRa mesh networking, not too many details but it appears to be possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdejQkTdC6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdejQkTdC6o
- roymurdock 11y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- abrookewood 11y agoAre we really downvoting xkcd? I don't see anything wrong with a little bit of humour on HN.
- MBCook 11y agoThat comic is a trope at this point. Any discussion of standards includes it. The comment didn't add anything. If it was a more substantive comment and mentioned the comic you'd have a point. But the comment might as well be a copy and paste job. It's not really adding to the discussion. I mean just from the discussion and the letters XKCD I knew which comic it was.
- nitrogen 11y agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- goatkcd 11y agohttp://goatkcd.com/1053/sfw http://goatkcd.com/1053/sfw
- abrookewood 11y agoFair enough, I'd have to agree.
- reitanqild 11y agoDidn't vote, but if I could vote for "stay at 1 point" I'd do. I mean, that comment isn't too bad but sometimes I (we?) get a sneaking suspicion that some of these (I didn't check the commenters comment history so I cannot say in this case) are attempts at "karma farming", which is annoying.
- 11y ago
- trollian 11y agoZigbee is fairly awful. Most of that space wasn't designed for consumer products or multi vendor interoperability. Being able to use the standard WiFi software & firmware stack but trading throughput for lower power and greater range has the potential to be a huge win. There are already many players who have WiFi silicon that it should be easy to adapt to this new protocol. Hopefully that will mean wide availability of solutions at competitive prices.