8 ms·

Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best part of my smart home

178 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
Amen to this. So many ‘smart home’ battles end up being WiFi battles. Zigbee is itself not perfect, but I’d much prefer to deal with Zigbee problems instead of propitiatory-protocol-and-app-probably-using-a-cloud-service-over-WiFi problems any day of the week.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  If you have a lot of it it's an ever ongoing war with empty batteries and lost pairing though. Every week I have to fix some switch, temperature or door sensor...
- alright2565 3y ago
  It's the opposite for me. I have so many problems with Zigbee devices dropping off the mesh for no reason and batteries dying in 1/10th the advertised time. Meanwhile my ESPHome devices have never had any issue whatsoever.
  - blagie 3y ago
    ESPHome is fine, but it's not representative of what people mean by "wifi devices." Most wifi devices require a proprietary app, sweep up your data to some fly-by-night operation, stop working during an internet outage, don't interoperate between vendors, "call home," and yet never receive security updates. Technically, it's 802.11, but by design, ESPHome is closer to Zigbee with a different underlying interface (802.11 rather than 802.15) than it is to most wifi devices. It's 100% open, simple, documented, reliable, etc. I'd be fine with wifi devices if they were ESPHome underneath. Heck, I'd probably set up a separate network for HomeAssistant and IoT. To that point, one major upside of 802.15 over 802.11 is battery life. I don't have any battery-powered 802.11 devices. It is possible to power zigbee devices from mains, and on my to do list at some point is to move a few of them from batteries to external power.
jwr 3y ago
Incidentally, I am building my own lighting controllers, largely because everything that is out there on the market sucks. Most importantly, I didn't want any "online accounts" for managing my devices, I didn't want to "agree to our privacy policy, your privacy is important" and then share all of my data with a company, and I didn't want anything that is Wi-Fi based. I decided to go with Bluetooth Mesh and so far I'm really happy with how it is designed and how it works. It hasn't seen much adoption in the consumer space, being mostly used in industrial settings — indeed, its apparent complexity may seem baffling at first. But if you start with a good implementation (Zephyr OS on Nordic devices), it works very well.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I went with zigbee simply because there seems to be a ton of devices available, and while many vendors try to build devices that don't adhere to default messages so you'd have to use their gateways that talk to the cloud, zigbee is simple enough to reverse engineer the communication and add support in all the open source ha solutions.
zehaeva 3y ago
I'm very privacy forward with respect to my home networks. I run a home zigbee network which does everything I want it to in the home. Yes I can't turn the lights on and off from the other side of the world, but neither can anyone else.
- srmarm 3y ago
  There are still even ways to expose the zigbee stuff, I can turn my zigbee lights on from the other side of the world and even access it via Google Home but it's on my terms and under my control. The actual switch itself is relatively dumb (which is a positive in this case!) (not to say you're doing it wrong btw, just to let others know that zigbee can still be linked onwards to the internet from the gateway)
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  Home Assistant (or, really, any local HA controller) plus a VPN will allow you to control them from anywhere you have Internet connectivity without exposing anything to a cloud-based service.
  - Medox 3y ago
    Or a combination of HA + Telegram (bots) that will trigger and respond to a /<command>, even with buttons. Maybe less secure than a VPN connection (e.g. if somebody gets control over the channel or bots instead of you/other trusted members) and of course more finicky until the bot works as desired, but always a nice party trick. Or a combination of VPN for home-critical automations and telegram bots for the simple/shared ones.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Between timers and motions sensors, I'm pretty much fully covered. There just isn't a reason for me to turn something on or off when I'm away.
santialbo 3y ago
I'm running Zigbee2Mqtt on my Homeassistant and so far it's been a very pleasant experience buying devices from different brands without having to use each vendors app. The compatibility list is gigantic https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/
- rekoil 3y ago
  I've seen a lot of references to Zigbee2MQTT. If I'm going to be using it through Home Assistant anyway, why should one choose Zigbee2MQTT over say ZHA?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    I used to run ZHA on my Home Assistant setup, and switched to Z2M a couple years ago. At the time it had a longer list of supported devices, and the UI for configuring them was better. It felt kind of “dirty” to layer in yet another protocol (MQTT) between the Zigbee side and the HA side, but it’s worked great. It could very well be that ZHA today is the same or even better than Z2M, but at the time I made the switchover, there was some device that I couldn’t use with ZHA that Z2M supported.
    - rekoil 3y ago
      I haven't really run across any devices that haven't worked in ZHA. I did recently buy the latest generation of Philips Hue Festavia string lights and Home Assistant (via ZHA) had no clue how to set any of the scenes on it. I was able to use the official app to set scenes via Bluetooth though, while still being able to use ZHA to control power and brightness. I believe the product was released very near the Christmas period though, so I'm sure it'll have full support in ZHA by next year, might just bring em out early and do it myself if nobody else has done it by then.
      - stavros 3y ago
        Same here, but with Z2M. Even some random, no-name, $20 thermostat works perfectly with Z2M, I can even set the week's schedules easily.
marcus0x62 3y ago
I've run around 20 Zigbee and an equal number of Zwave devices for several years. Zigbee is great. Zwave is terrible: despite operating at a better frequency for a home environment (lots of walls,) in my experience is has worse propagation, higher latency, and an unreliable mesh topology that randomly breaks and has to be manually repaired.
- bliteben 3y ago
  What zwave devices have you been using? I have only used zwave (leviton, ge) and have only had to restart a switch 2-3 times. My biggest gripe with zwave was when home assistant switched the supported plugin.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    * GE/Jasco switches (the bulk of my devices, around 10 total.) * GE/Jasco outdoor outlet controls * Schlage motorized door locks * Linear garage door controller * Aeotec outlet control * Aeotec repeater * Aeotec temperature and humidity sensor
- robalfonso 3y ago
  I've found that some people have great zigbee experiences and terrible z-wave and just as many are the opposite. I chalk it up to individual environments etc. Go with what works best from you.
- planb 3y ago
  Anecdote from the other side: my zwave devices just work for 8 years now, while there are times some zigbee devices just don’t respond. I suspect the zwave network is more stable because all routers are powered all the time, while I have lots of zigbee bulbs that are behind a real switch so they leave the network if I turn the lights off. There seems like to be no way in zigbee from preventing those devices to be used as routers.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I've read zigbee really doesn't like routers that aren't available 24/7 so I'm planning on avoiding this.
malermeister 3y ago
Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best, I agree. Inherently local-only, so no cloud that sends your data god knows where and can be turned off without any notice. A standard system, so you can buy stuff from any manufacturer and be sure it works with your hub. It's what smart home should be.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  The only "catch" is if you want to use a voice assistant/smart speaker, which is either built into the hub, or requires a integration.
  - r2_pilot 3y ago
    I rolled my own several years ago with Voice Attack and python
    - malermeister 3y ago
      rhasspy is a popular open source solution - I've used it before, but I'm not sure if it's still in development
wlesieutre 3y ago
What happens if your gateway dies and has to be replaced? From what I've read, this theoretically can be done, but in practice you end up unlinking and migrating every device one by one. But it's been a few years since I looked into it, maybe someone has made improvements? Otherwise, this is a huge advantage of wifi-based smarthome devices.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  I just replaced my Ikea hub (changed from Tradfri to Dirigera). It was annoying to do, but not hard. Took about ~90 seconds for each device. I did them individually, but I could have done them in parallel to speed it up. Not something I want to do once a month, but once every two years is “reasonable” (compared to non-smart home items).
- Klathmon 3y ago
  So for zigbee this is very possible and I've recently done it multiple times without any issues whatsoever. I used to use a ConbeeII as my zigbee coordinator, but my server rack is located at an awful position in the house for coverage, so I picked up a TubeZB PoE EFR32 based coordinator [1] which has been incredible! I use home assistant, and it was trivial to backup the network, unplug the ConbeeII, put in the IP address of the new coordinator, and import the backup there and everything just continued to work. Then I had that die, it was actually the PoE portion which died, so I did the reverse and transferred everything back to my ConbeeII while I diagnosed and fixed it, then when it was fixed transferred everything back to the TubeZB coordinator. It actually took longer to get the IP address assigned on the TubeZB coordinator than it did to transfer my network each time, it was incredibly simple. I'm not sure for z-wave though. I do use it, but I've never had a z-wave gateway die on me, or had any reason to replace it where I wasn't also moving or something. [1] https://tubeszb.com/product/efr32-mgm21-poe-coordinator/ https://tubeszb.com/product/efr32-mgm21-poe-coordinator/
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Good to know! One of the more specific things I was wondering is that when you relinked everything if HA would forget what's what or if it would hook the devices back up to all their automations afterward. I have some Hue bulbs which are Zigbee, but I've been considering getting out of Hue's ecosystem for controlling them.
ab_goat 3y ago
I've been using Z-wave devices since 2017 for the following: 1. Dimmer lighting 2. Door sensors 3. Relays to customize radiant flooring better than thermostats 4. Seasonal lighting (outdoor string lights/Christmas tree) 5. Thermostat Overall it's been a good experience, however I think the SmartThings app is a pain in the butt and should be a much better experience.
edude03 3y ago
(I've been running home automation stuff for ~10 years now but) I am little surprised the author thought wifi/bluetooth would be better than technology made specifically for (home?) automation. To me meshing is a natural fit for interconnecting devices all around the house vs the hub and spoke model that wifi has. Furthermore, I (read) and kind of disagree that thread/matter is a mess, but I'm coming from the point of view of an engineer who is keenly interested in home automation tech; for the typical consumer that's probably a fair take.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Thread and matter are a mess from both technical and consumer angles. Yes, they are both good technologies...but the players in the hub space have made an utter mess of it if you have multiple hubs or, like most Americans, use an iPhone but have Nest or Echo devices. Then you have the lack of adoption of thread in general. And finally, Matter support being always 6 months away for everything or just straight up not working. It is mind blowing to me that it was easier for me to set up my Wiz bulbs to work in Homekit via HA than to get them to actually frickin work over Matter...seeing as the Matter logo was on the box when I bought them. Honestly, I'm kinda shocked that no hub company has shipped a Cheap Zwave/Zigbee integrated HA hub. Sure you have HA Green and Yellow and all that, but you could get that price way down with a simple partnership and purpose built hardware that is elegant.
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    I think an integrated hub would be a bit extra tbh. Amazon sells a coordinator usb for $20, so pair that with anything that can rub home assistant(raspi, ha green/yellow, old laptop, etc.) and you have a ZigBee hub that's plug and play for ZHA and Z2M.
  - edude03 3y ago
    Yeah, not having a way to share keys between thread networks I think is the biggest technical challenge for the user/user experience. Home Assistant for example is able to import keys from an iOS device using its app and join a HomeKit thread network, but I don't know if that approach is scalable. > Cheap Zwave/Zigbee integrated HA hub The ikea Dirigera and smartthings hub have great HA support from what I understand, I'm not sure what'd it take to get the HA logo slapped on the box and have them officially supported though
bombcar 3y ago
The main thing I've learned from this smarthome stuff is make sure your light switches also work when damn near everything but the power itself is off. Really annoying not being able to turn the lights on or off because something (doesn't matter what) is not cooperating on a software level.
- Avamander 3y ago
  Yea, the behaviour I want is always just to enhance not replace. This is why I dislike smart bulbs with dumb switches and similar bad combos. Smart home appliances shouldn't hide any features behind an app either. But every manufacturer has perverse incentives to push their apps.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Things have regressed - the older Hue stuff could have switches that had no batteries (pressing the button generated enough electricity to send the signal) and they could communicate directly with the gateway or even the bulbs. Now everything is wifi or bluetooth and it sucks. Five years ago I would have designed a new house entirely around these things; now it would be so old-fashioned it wouldn't look out of place in the 1950s.
    - xrd 3y ago
      Yes, it is insane how these things work. We bought a 60s house which presumably had bad wiring. The sellers elected to use "smart bulbs" and "smart switches" for everything to probably save money on the rewiring cost. The thing you never realize, is that for each extra communication protocol and endpoint you add, you need to then troubleshoot across all the permutations. So, if you are only using a wire to connect to another wire, there is only one path that can fail, the wire between them. Electricians are good at troubleshooting that. If you add a wifi access point, and a smart bulb router (or whatever the fuck it is) and then you add a wifi extender, when things fail, which path did it take when it failed, or when it worked? The permutations you need to troubleshoot are suddenly an N^4 problem. Get your graph theory textbooks out and study up on the traveling salesman problem. That's why we have had electricians come by who cannot figure out why when we push the wifi light dimmer button in one bedroom, that the other bedroom lights turn off. It just started happening a few months back. It's absolutely maddening. All these smart devices are awful. As a related aside, our Amazon Ring devices no longer allow you to connect to their wifi with the Amazon Ring app, and we have a bunch of cameras that are dead once the power goes off. Used to be you could just join their temp wifi connection, register the device on the home wifi, and go. They turned that off. Now, they all say you need to get the QR code, but we cannot find that on the devices, so they are bricked. I'm sure this is because probably someone found an open wifi Ring camera, added it using their phone when they walked by, and spied on the family. But, I don't really care, I just know cameras are sitting there unusable by me, until some hacker walks by and figures out how to register them. I won't be spending anymore money on Amazon cameras, but I'm sure Amazon would be happy to have me just buy new ones.
otterley 3y ago
I would very much like to adopt Zigbee at home since it has the privacy and reliability features I want. The problem is the market: there just aren’t enough equipment options out there, and the few that are available are nontrivial to acquire (and who knows how long the vendors will survive). Sure, I can get some light switches, but not at my local home supply. And light switches are just one type of controller. I’ve got shades, door locks, thermostats, and more. The choices are so few. Sure, maybe an example exists, but if I don’t like the ergonomics or style, well, too bad. It’s like shopping in the former Soviet Union.
joshstrange 3y ago
This is the advice I give everyone who is interested in smart home stuff: Pick Zigbee or Z-Wave and only buy that type of product, WiFi is trash. I'm not super keen on Thread/Matter seeing how one of its goal seems to be allowing your devices access to the internet which is the exact opposite of what I want. I want my devices to be dumb, only able to talk to the hub, and then the hub can optionally run some code to connect outside the network if and when I decide. The best part about my Z-Wave setup is every manufacturer can go out of business and I won't even notice. That's a stark difference to something WiFi based which almost always requires a cloud component. I understand why people start with WiFi devices, they don't need a hub, but having a local hub is the best way to do anything "smart home" by far. Personally I use Home Assistant but before that I used SmartThings and liked it well enough.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Thread is based on Zigbee. It functions fine without the internet.
  - abollaert 3y ago
    I thought both Thread and Zigbee run on top of IEEE802.15.4, but Thread is based on 6LoWPAN / IPv6 where Zigbee uses its own network layer. But Thread idd functions fine without the internet (although you probably could connect devices to the internet if you'd want to).
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      Also important is that Zigbee is both the transport protocol and multiple home automational protocols. Zigbee compatibility is pretty good with the same protocol but not across different protocols. Thread is a transport protocol for Matter home automation protocol. Matter is complex because it tries to do everything in one protocol.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    Thread is based on Zigbee in the sense that the thread designers read papers about the Zigbee spec. Also matter is partially based on Zigbee with its use of Zigbee clusters (deep in the stack, away from end users). Zigbee and thread are different protocols and incompatible. You cannot mix them and that’s what most people are about.
CharlesW 3y ago
For people who haven't started their smart home project, my advice is to focus on Thread and Matter. Regardless of growing pains, Thread and Matter work today, have momentum, and are clearly the future. (Note: The negative article the author linked to under "Matter and Thread are a big mess" to support his position was written by the same person.) Z-Wave was a pre-IP proprietary standard that was forced towards standardization (Z-Wave Alliance remains a gatekeeper), but its future is unclear at best. Thread and Matter are the spiritual descendants of Zigbee, all of which are based on IEEE 802.15.4. Also, I've seen posts praising the old protocols because they allow local control, but those concerns are unrelated. Alexa supports Thread and Matter but does not support local control, while HA and HomeKit support Thread and Matter and do support local control.
- dm_me_dogs 3y ago
  HomeKit-over-Thread and Matter-over-Thread has been pretty okay in my experience, using HomePods and an Apple TV 4K as the border routers. I'm using Home Assistant, and the HomePods control everything nicely. Setup is a little weird (you have to set up your devices in HomeKit first, remove and then add again in Home Assistant without resetting) but they work great. My only complaint is that HomePod Software and tvOS updates tend to bork the devices until I reboot HA, but that takes 10 ish seconds so not a big deal.
- santialbo 3y ago
  I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. For that reason I decided to go with what's cheap and works today, which is Zigbee.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. When you compare apples-to-apples, there's no price penalty — for example, a Leviton Decora smart dimmer is $56 for Zigbee or $50 for Matter. Kasa's Matter dimmer switch is $27, and I see $3 Matter devices on AliExpress. Matter and Thread don't currently match Zigbee in terms of device diversity, but that's just a matter of time. > Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. Even hundreds of Matter devices using Wi-Fi would collectively use an insignificant portion of your Wi-Fi network's throughput.
hiddencost 3y ago
I've been using zigbee for industrial applications. The security angle is particularly appreciated by a factory that wants to control their vents from one button without running tons of copper wiring. They're not going to put that on their network.
- apapapa 3y ago
  If their only worry is using less copper, I am worried.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    If it's done well, less copper might mean easy maintenance, more room for other stuff, extensibility, etc. "one wire per thing" installations move the difficulty out of the software and onto physically keeping track of all those wires.
sdflhasjd 3y ago
When I started I had a good mix of all 3 (WiFi, Zigbee & Z-wave). 5 years layer, everything's slowly been absorbed into Zigbee. WiFi isn't a mesh network, so there's extremities with poor reliability. Z-wave just seemed to suffer from poor device availability, and everything turned out to be more expensive with no real benefit. Also, one other thing to mention with WiFi and Bluetooth is how it's basically a massive red flag, a stamp of "hey, this device needs our shit app to use." It's just a shame there's no Zigbee ESP32 equivalent for all my hobby bits.
- shellfishgene 3y ago
  There is [1], but it's not open source and 'advanced' functions, like battery operation, cost money. Also this [2] project is promising, but in the early stages I think. Also I guess newer ESP32 support zigbee in principle, there is some discussion of adding this to ESPHome. [1] https://ptvo.info/zigbee-configurable-firmware-features/ https://ptvo.info/zigbee-configurable-firmware-features/ [2] https://github.com/ffenix113/zigbee_home https://github.com/ffenix113/zigbee_home
sitzkrieg 3y ago
becoming more and more impressed at the number of devices being crammed into each home clogging up the already decimated ism bands
- eternityforest 3y ago
  But at the same time more and more stuff that actually uses heavy bandwidth is moving out into 5GHz and other high frequency bands.
mlichvar 3y ago
My current understanding of the wireless technologies wrt to home automation: - wifi is most reliable, secure, easiest to debug, but usable only for mains-powered devices due to higher energy consumption - bluetooth LE has lowest energy consumption, best for unreliable broadcasting of data (e.g. temperature sensors), but has shorter range - zigbee is best for battery-powered devices where reliable communication is needed and is initiated by the device (e.g. switch, window/door sensor) - zwave is best for battery-powered devices which need to quickly receive data (e.g. door lock or directly controller radiator valves), but security seems problematic according to some reports
- santialbo 3y ago
  Add to wifi that if you plan on having a lot of devices your router might commit seppuku. Zigbee can hold hundreds of devices (as long a you have zb routers in your mesh)
- burnerthrow008 3y ago
  Regardless of theory, my experience has been that WiFi communications are significantly less reliable than Zigbee or BLE, and typically have worse latency to boot. Unless you have a bunch of WiFi APs around your house, practical range with Zigbee is also better than WiFi because powered Zigbee nodes (like lightbulbs and switched outlets) act as mesh routers. One additional benefit of Zigbee and Wave is the possibility of creating battery-less devices, like the Philips Hue Tap switch, which uses a hammer and piezoelectric generator for power.
anonuser1234 3y ago
I actually went down the zigbee rabbit hole with my house last week. I tried the best selling zigbee motion sensors on amazon, however, they only worked within line of sight of the zigbee antenna. I then tried the Phillips hue motion sensors. They worked flawlessly throughout my home.
devonkim 3y ago
One thing I found a bit unsettling about some products is how manufacturers can say they support a standard when they’re really using it as a basis for a proprietary lock-in strategy. I didn’t realize the standards were so loose until I started researching some newer devices to support Home Assistant, namely the Aqara U100 which seems to require the Aqara hub to be able to support standard Zigbee when it’s advertised as supporting Zigbee https://community.home-assistant.io/t/aqara-u100-smart-lock/579805 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/aqara-u100-smart-lock/...
- yurishimo 3y ago
  Is this true of Zwave? From what I understood, one of the reasons that zwave devices are substantially more expensive, is that the licensing and certification requirements are much more strict. There also isn't a "first party" zwave hub that I can find. The Zwave alliance seems to only deal with the protocol and licensing, thus, any hub that claims to support zwave, will work with any zwave device.
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    That's been my experience so far. I have ~20 Z-wave devices from a variety of manufacturers. They all work very well with Home Assistant, and many of them now support firmware updating directly through HA as well.
  - gh02t 3y ago
    No. Loosely speaking, Zwave pretty strictly defines a list of device types (lightbulb, thermometer, etc) and supported formats for read/writes to it by device type (turn on/off, reports temperature,...). The API to handle those is then standardized, and the device manufacturer just fills in the code to implement the calls appropriate to the device. Devices are more-or-less "self-describing." Baseline Zigbee is a bit more freeform (it's not solely a home automation protocol) and is a transport for whatever data format manufacturers want to send, with devices implementing their own details on top. Later on there was an attempt to standardize the communication format for home automation similar to how Zwave works and it was somewhat successful, but manufacturers still have a bad habit of having deviations and quirks. The standard is also not as rigidly enforced like it is with Zwave. Again this is all simplified and there's more nuance but that's generally the breakdown. Practically speaking you'll have more consistency with Zwave devices, but nowadays Zigbee devices have a lot more variety. Support for (and quality of support for) new devices in Zigbee can be a bit more hit-or-miss, but it's usually pretty good nowadays with Zigbee having more marketshare/momentum. I use both, I have more problems with Zigbee, but I also have more devices for it by virtue of their being more choices.
yesimahuman 3y ago
My zigbee devices are the best part of my smart home setup (with home assistant). They always work, battery life is ridiculous, and they’re interoperable. Have only had issues with one motion detector from a brand that has otherwise been rock solid. If I had only known about zigbee before I swore off smart home tech (instead of wifi and proprietary hubs) the last time I tried I would have had a lot more fun!
bhaney 3y ago
Apparently I'm one of the rare few people who fell on the WiFi side of the WiFi/Zigbee smart home war. All of my lightbulbs, occupancy sensors, etc just connect directly to WiFi, and run custom firmware that I wrote so I know exactly what they're doing and how to control them. They make no attempt to access the wider Internet, but they're all on a vlan without Internet access anyway. It feels like introducing Zigbee to this would just be an extra hub device taking up space, acting as an extra point of failure, and making it more complicated to develop against my devices. As it stands now I can easily manually control devices by piping crap into netcat if I need to for some reason, since they're all just normal IP networked devices. I think I would have to jump though extra hoops to do similar things with Zigbee. Is the main aspect driving people to Zigbee just that off the shelf consumer smart devices that use WiFi tend to be annoying dogshit, and Zigbee keeps manufacturers in line better? I don't see any reliability or simplicity benefits to it, just the market poisoning WiFi and Zigbee being the only worthwhile alternative.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  For zigbee, you could either obtain a zigbee/usb dongle (interact over virtual serial port to send zigbee commands - tons of libraries exist to provide an api surface), or obtain a hub and figure out its api. Zigbee also has functional mesh features that wifi doesn't. One is designed for high bandwidth single point communication while the other is designed for low bandwidth long range.
- Tomuus 3y ago
  ZigBee is a mesh network, this is very important in many situations eg. battery powered or large area
- dzikimarian 3y ago
  There's at least a few interesting points for zigbee: * If you use universal hub like Home Assistant, they are pretty interoperable between various manufacturers * Devices don't have direct connection to internet (again esp. with HA), so better privacy, they are faster (no cloud lag) and do not depend on internet connection * Battery life is way better for small devices * Mesh is nice when you have bigger area to cover * If you have to use shitty ISP router, it will have issues with large number of devices * Usually easy push-to-pair setup And there isn't many downsides - one time cost of some kind of coordinator and very slightly pricier equipment.
t43562 3y ago
I have had a rotten time so far trying to get anything to happen with my Tradfri lights - I started off assuming that all of this could be done from the commandline - no not without difficulty. How do you pair your computer's zigbee with the lightbulb? Who @#$#$ knows. The button - how do you EVER get that to pair or do you? I'm so hacked off with it I cannot go back and try again for a while but IMO it all has a very long way before it gets as simple even as bluetooth and that was always pretty horrible itself (from the commandline at least).
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
Zigbee continues to be the only reliable thing in my household. I switched to the IKEA Dirigera hub for most of it and it's pretty stable. Cannot say that about almost anything else and I tried a lot.
apapapa 3y ago
So functionality isn't the best part of your smart home? For me it is a wirelessly-controlled deadbolt
tw04 3y ago
+1 for Hubitat - assuming they don't sell out their business model is perfect. They sell the base hardware which you'll need to upgrade over time as new z-wave/zigbee/other protocols come out. Additionally they will sell a subscription for backing up the hub configuration to the cloud, and essentially creating a reverse proxy to manage their hubs remotely. The hub can operate completely offline, or if you're technically capable of setting up a reverse proxy/vpn/whatever to manage it you can do that as well. They provide timely updates, the hub for the most part has been rock solid, and the upgrade path between generations is pretty painless. I've got a mix of both zigbee, z-wave, and a handful of wifi devices (that were free, I would never ever spend money on a wifi smart device if I could avoid it). As an added bonus if you were a smartthings user, you can migrate your automation/drivers/etc with little to no modifications. Think about them as smart things 2.0. www.hubitat.com Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a fan.
m463 3y ago
question - what system would you recommend for people in high density housing?
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
I started domotics with X10, and migrated time to time to some newfangled solution once they stabilized. Right now, I use Home Assistant (HA) with Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, BLE, and LoRa. Some talk directly to HA, some go to MQTT, some through ESPHome, some through HACS integrations. Current winners are Z-Wave and Zigbee. Both very much depend on the manufacturer's implementation. I have some Zigbee or Z-Wave devices that choke randomly, but provide too many niceties (I am looking at you Aqara). I am leery of WiFi solutions as many have noted. I block all access to the world, and on some sites where I have domotics, there is no internet most of the time. I have been delighted with Martin Jerry and Shelly WiFi switches. They work like fresh butter on a crispy garlic toast in a cold morning. Many others on the other hand are super heavy with outbound traffic. (Why does a thermostat need to "check for firmware" daily?) There is something about Matter that just puts me off. Not the technology mind you, but the invisible business posture on how Matter may end up functioning. "You can use our Matter our device any way you want to and can connect to anything, as long as it goes through our Matter Commissioner first"... alas, I might not have to worry about this maturing.
walth 3y ago
> Z-Wave is in some ways the better pick going forward Z-Wave unfortunately is already dead. The legacy certification process, the higher cost chips, and the global frequency bifurcation.
password4321 3y ago
Related today: Home Assistant: Three years later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345122

178 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

Amen to this. So many ‘smart home’ battles end up being WiFi battles. Zigbee is itself not perfect, but I’d much prefer to deal with Zigbee problems instead of propitiatory-protocol-and-app-probably-using-a-cloud-service-over-WiFi problems any day of the week.

wkat4242 3y ago
If you have a lot of it it's an ever ongoing war with empty batteries and lost pairing though. Every week I have to fix some switch, temperature or door sensor...
alright2565 3y ago
It's the opposite for me. I have so many problems with Zigbee devices dropping off the mesh for no reason and batteries dying in 1/10th the advertised time. Meanwhile my ESPHome devices have never had any issue whatsoever.
- blagie 3y ago
  ESPHome is fine, but it's not representative of what people mean by "wifi devices." Most wifi devices require a proprietary app, sweep up your data to some fly-by-night operation, stop working during an internet outage, don't interoperate between vendors, "call home," and yet never receive security updates. Technically, it's 802.11, but by design, ESPHome is closer to Zigbee with a different underlying interface (802.11 rather than 802.15) than it is to most wifi devices. It's 100% open, simple, documented, reliable, etc. I'd be fine with wifi devices if they were ESPHome underneath. Heck, I'd probably set up a separate network for HomeAssistant and IoT. To that point, one major upside of 802.15 over 802.11 is battery life. I don't have any battery-powered 802.11 devices. It is possible to power zigbee devices from mains, and on my to do list at some point is to move a few of them from batteries to external power.

jwr 3y ago

Incidentally, I am building my own lighting controllers, largely because everything that is out there on the market sucks. Most importantly, I didn't want any "online accounts" for managing my devices, I didn't want to "agree to our privacy policy, your privacy is important" and then share all of my data with a company, and I didn't want anything that is Wi-Fi based. I decided to go with Bluetooth Mesh and so far I'm really happy with how it is designed and how it works. It hasn't seen much adoption in the consumer space, being mostly used in industrial settings — indeed, its apparent complexity may seem baffling at first. But if you start with a good implementation (Zephyr OS on Nordic devices), it works very well.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
I went with zigbee simply because there seems to be a ton of devices available, and while many vendors try to build devices that don't adhere to default messages so you'd have to use their gateways that talk to the cloud, zigbee is simple enough to reverse engineer the communication and add support in all the open source ha solutions.

zehaeva 3y ago

I'm very privacy forward with respect to my home networks. I run a home zigbee network which does everything I want it to in the home. Yes I can't turn the lights on and off from the other side of the world, but neither can anyone else.

srmarm 3y ago
There are still even ways to expose the zigbee stuff, I can turn my zigbee lights on from the other side of the world and even access it via Google Home but it's on my terms and under my control. The actual switch itself is relatively dumb (which is a positive in this case!) (not to say you're doing it wrong btw, just to let others know that zigbee can still be linked onwards to the internet from the gateway)
marcus0x62 3y ago
Home Assistant (or, really, any local HA controller) plus a VPN will allow you to control them from anywhere you have Internet connectivity without exposing anything to a cloud-based service.
- Medox 3y ago
  Or a combination of HA + Telegram (bots) that will trigger and respond to a /<command>, even with buttons. Maybe less secure than a VPN connection (e.g. if somebody gets control over the channel or bots instead of you/other trusted members) and of course more finicky until the bot works as desired, but always a nice party trick. Or a combination of VPN for home-critical automations and telegram bots for the simple/shared ones.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
Between timers and motions sensors, I'm pretty much fully covered. There just isn't a reason for me to turn something on or off when I'm away.

santialbo 3y ago

I'm running Zigbee2Mqtt on my Homeassistant and so far it's been a very pleasant experience buying devices from different brands without having to use each vendors app. The compatibility list is gigantic https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/

rekoil 3y ago
I've seen a lot of references to Zigbee2MQTT. If I'm going to be using it through Home Assistant anyway, why should one choose Zigbee2MQTT over say ZHA?
- function_seven 3y ago
  I used to run ZHA on my Home Assistant setup, and switched to Z2M a couple years ago. At the time it had a longer list of supported devices, and the UI for configuring them was better. It felt kind of “dirty” to layer in yet another protocol (MQTT) between the Zigbee side and the HA side, but it’s worked great. It could very well be that ZHA today is the same or even better than Z2M, but at the time I made the switchover, there was some device that I couldn’t use with ZHA that Z2M supported.
  - rekoil 3y ago
    I haven't really run across any devices that haven't worked in ZHA. I did recently buy the latest generation of Philips Hue Festavia string lights and Home Assistant (via ZHA) had no clue how to set any of the scenes on it. I was able to use the official app to set scenes via Bluetooth though, while still being able to use ZHA to control power and brightness. I believe the product was released very near the Christmas period though, so I'm sure it'll have full support in ZHA by next year, might just bring em out early and do it myself if nobody else has done it by then.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Same here, but with Z2M. Even some random, no-name, $20 thermostat works perfectly with Z2M, I can even set the week's schedules easily.

marcus0x62 3y ago

I've run around 20 Zigbee and an equal number of Zwave devices for several years. Zigbee is great. Zwave is terrible: despite operating at a better frequency for a home environment (lots of walls,) in my experience is has worse propagation, higher latency, and an unreliable mesh topology that randomly breaks and has to be manually repaired.

bliteben 3y ago
What zwave devices have you been using? I have only used zwave (leviton, ge) and have only had to restart a switch 2-3 times. My biggest gripe with zwave was when home assistant switched the supported plugin.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  * GE/Jasco switches (the bulk of my devices, around 10 total.) * GE/Jasco outdoor outlet controls * Schlage motorized door locks * Linear garage door controller * Aeotec outlet control * Aeotec repeater * Aeotec temperature and humidity sensor
robalfonso 3y ago
I've found that some people have great zigbee experiences and terrible z-wave and just as many are the opposite. I chalk it up to individual environments etc. Go with what works best from you.
planb 3y ago
Anecdote from the other side: my zwave devices just work for 8 years now, while there are times some zigbee devices just don’t respond. I suspect the zwave network is more stable because all routers are powered all the time, while I have lots of zigbee bulbs that are behind a real switch so they leave the network if I turn the lights off. There seems like to be no way in zigbee from preventing those devices to be used as routers.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I've read zigbee really doesn't like routers that aren't available 24/7 so I'm planning on avoiding this.

malermeister 3y ago

Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best, I agree. Inherently local-only, so no cloud that sends your data god knows where and can be turned off without any notice. A standard system, so you can buy stuff from any manufacturer and be sure it works with your hub. It's what smart home should be.

alistairSH 3y ago
The only "catch" is if you want to use a voice assistant/smart speaker, which is either built into the hub, or requires a integration.
- r2_pilot 3y ago
  I rolled my own several years ago with Voice Attack and python
  - malermeister 3y ago
    rhasspy is a popular open source solution - I've used it before, but I'm not sure if it's still in development

wlesieutre 3y ago

What happens if your gateway dies and has to be replaced? From what I've read, this theoretically can be done, but in practice you end up unlinking and migrating every device one by one. But it's been a few years since I looked into it, maybe someone has made improvements? Otherwise, this is a huge advantage of wifi-based smarthome devices.

LeafItAlone 3y ago
I just replaced my Ikea hub (changed from Tradfri to Dirigera). It was annoying to do, but not hard. Took about ~90 seconds for each device. I did them individually, but I could have done them in parallel to speed it up. Not something I want to do once a month, but once every two years is “reasonable” (compared to non-smart home items).
Klathmon 3y ago
So for zigbee this is very possible and I've recently done it multiple times without any issues whatsoever. I used to use a ConbeeII as my zigbee coordinator, but my server rack is located at an awful position in the house for coverage, so I picked up a TubeZB PoE EFR32 based coordinator [1] which has been incredible! I use home assistant, and it was trivial to backup the network, unplug the ConbeeII, put in the IP address of the new coordinator, and import the backup there and everything just continued to work. Then I had that die, it was actually the PoE portion which died, so I did the reverse and transferred everything back to my ConbeeII while I diagnosed and fixed it, then when it was fixed transferred everything back to the TubeZB coordinator. It actually took longer to get the IP address assigned on the TubeZB coordinator than it did to transfer my network each time, it was incredibly simple. I'm not sure for z-wave though. I do use it, but I've never had a z-wave gateway die on me, or had any reason to replace it where I wasn't also moving or something. [1] https://tubeszb.com/product/efr32-mgm21-poe-coordinator/ https://tubeszb.com/product/efr32-mgm21-poe-coordinator/
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Good to know! One of the more specific things I was wondering is that when you relinked everything if HA would forget what's what or if it would hook the devices back up to all their automations afterward. I have some Hue bulbs which are Zigbee, but I've been considering getting out of Hue's ecosystem for controlling them.

ab_goat 3y ago

I've been using Z-wave devices since 2017 for the following: 1. Dimmer lighting 2. Door sensors 3. Relays to customize radiant flooring better than thermostats 4. Seasonal lighting (outdoor string lights/Christmas tree) 5. Thermostat Overall it's been a good experience, however I think the SmartThings app is a pain in the butt and should be a much better experience.

edude03 3y ago

(I've been running home automation stuff for ~10 years now but) I am little surprised the author thought wifi/bluetooth would be better than technology made specifically for (home?) automation. To me meshing is a natural fit for interconnecting devices all around the house vs the hub and spoke model that wifi has. Furthermore, I (read) and kind of disagree that thread/matter is a mess, but I'm coming from the point of view of an engineer who is keenly interested in home automation tech; for the typical consumer that's probably a fair take.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
Thread and matter are a mess from both technical and consumer angles. Yes, they are both good technologies...but the players in the hub space have made an utter mess of it if you have multiple hubs or, like most Americans, use an iPhone but have Nest or Echo devices. Then you have the lack of adoption of thread in general. And finally, Matter support being always 6 months away for everything or just straight up not working. It is mind blowing to me that it was easier for me to set up my Wiz bulbs to work in Homekit via HA than to get them to actually frickin work over Matter...seeing as the Matter logo was on the box when I bought them. Honestly, I'm kinda shocked that no hub company has shipped a Cheap Zwave/Zigbee integrated HA hub. Sure you have HA Green and Yellow and all that, but you could get that price way down with a simple partnership and purpose built hardware that is elegant.
- Xelynega 3y ago
  I think an integrated hub would be a bit extra tbh. Amazon sells a coordinator usb for $20, so pair that with anything that can rub home assistant(raspi, ha green/yellow, old laptop, etc.) and you have a ZigBee hub that's plug and play for ZHA and Z2M.
- edude03 3y ago
  Yeah, not having a way to share keys between thread networks I think is the biggest technical challenge for the user/user experience. Home Assistant for example is able to import keys from an iOS device using its app and join a HomeKit thread network, but I don't know if that approach is scalable. > Cheap Zwave/Zigbee integrated HA hub The ikea Dirigera and smartthings hub have great HA support from what I understand, I'm not sure what'd it take to get the HA logo slapped on the box and have them officially supported though

bombcar 3y ago

The main thing I've learned from this smarthome stuff is make sure your light switches also work when damn near everything but the power itself is off. Really annoying not being able to turn the lights on or off because something (doesn't matter what) is not cooperating on a software level.

Avamander 3y ago
Yea, the behaviour I want is always just to enhance not replace. This is why I dislike smart bulbs with dumb switches and similar bad combos. Smart home appliances shouldn't hide any features behind an app either. But every manufacturer has perverse incentives to push their apps.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Things have regressed - the older Hue stuff could have switches that had no batteries (pressing the button generated enough electricity to send the signal) and they could communicate directly with the gateway or even the bulbs. Now everything is wifi or bluetooth and it sucks. Five years ago I would have designed a new house entirely around these things; now it would be so old-fashioned it wouldn't look out of place in the 1950s.
  - xrd 3y ago
    Yes, it is insane how these things work. We bought a 60s house which presumably had bad wiring. The sellers elected to use "smart bulbs" and "smart switches" for everything to probably save money on the rewiring cost. The thing you never realize, is that for each extra communication protocol and endpoint you add, you need to then troubleshoot across all the permutations. So, if you are only using a wire to connect to another wire, there is only one path that can fail, the wire between them. Electricians are good at troubleshooting that. If you add a wifi access point, and a smart bulb router (or whatever the fuck it is) and then you add a wifi extender, when things fail, which path did it take when it failed, or when it worked? The permutations you need to troubleshoot are suddenly an N^4 problem. Get your graph theory textbooks out and study up on the traveling salesman problem. That's why we have had electricians come by who cannot figure out why when we push the wifi light dimmer button in one bedroom, that the other bedroom lights turn off. It just started happening a few months back. It's absolutely maddening. All these smart devices are awful. As a related aside, our Amazon Ring devices no longer allow you to connect to their wifi with the Amazon Ring app, and we have a bunch of cameras that are dead once the power goes off. Used to be you could just join their temp wifi connection, register the device on the home wifi, and go. They turned that off. Now, they all say you need to get the QR code, but we cannot find that on the devices, so they are bricked. I'm sure this is because probably someone found an open wifi Ring camera, added it using their phone when they walked by, and spied on the family. But, I don't really care, I just know cameras are sitting there unusable by me, until some hacker walks by and figures out how to register them. I won't be spending anymore money on Amazon cameras, but I'm sure Amazon would be happy to have me just buy new ones.

otterley 3y ago

I would very much like to adopt Zigbee at home since it has the privacy and reliability features I want. The problem is the market: there just aren’t enough equipment options out there, and the few that are available are nontrivial to acquire (and who knows how long the vendors will survive). Sure, I can get some light switches, but not at my local home supply. And light switches are just one type of controller. I’ve got shades, door locks, thermostats, and more. The choices are so few. Sure, maybe an example exists, but if I don’t like the ergonomics or style, well, too bad. It’s like shopping in the former Soviet Union.

joshstrange 3y ago

This is the advice I give everyone who is interested in smart home stuff: Pick Zigbee or Z-Wave and only buy that type of product, WiFi is trash. I'm not super keen on Thread/Matter seeing how one of its goal seems to be allowing your devices access to the internet which is the exact opposite of what I want. I want my devices to be dumb, only able to talk to the hub, and then the hub can optionally run some code to connect outside the network if and when I decide. The best part about my Z-Wave setup is every manufacturer can go out of business and I won't even notice. That's a stark difference to something WiFi based which almost always requires a cloud component. I understand why people start with WiFi devices, they don't need a hub, but having a local hub is the best way to do anything "smart home" by far. Personally I use Home Assistant but before that I used SmartThings and liked it well enough.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Thread is based on Zigbee. It functions fine without the internet.
- abollaert 3y ago
  I thought both Thread and Zigbee run on top of IEEE802.15.4, but Thread is based on 6LoWPAN / IPv6 where Zigbee uses its own network layer. But Thread idd functions fine without the internet (although you probably could connect devices to the internet if you'd want to).
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Also important is that Zigbee is both the transport protocol and multiple home automational protocols. Zigbee compatibility is pretty good with the same protocol but not across different protocols. Thread is a transport protocol for Matter home automation protocol. Matter is complex because it tries to do everything in one protocol.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Thread is based on Zigbee in the sense that the thread designers read papers about the Zigbee spec. Also matter is partially based on Zigbee with its use of Zigbee clusters (deep in the stack, away from end users). Zigbee and thread are different protocols and incompatible. You cannot mix them and that’s what most people are about.

CharlesW 3y ago

For people who haven't started their smart home project, my advice is to focus on Thread and Matter. Regardless of growing pains, Thread and Matter work today, have momentum, and are clearly the future. (Note: The negative article the author linked to under "Matter and Thread are a big mess" to support his position was written by the same person.) Z-Wave was a pre-IP proprietary standard that was forced towards standardization (Z-Wave Alliance remains a gatekeeper), but its future is unclear at best. Thread and Matter are the spiritual descendants of Zigbee, all of which are based on IEEE 802.15.4. Also, I've seen posts praising the old protocols because they allow local control, but those concerns are unrelated. Alexa supports Thread and Matter but does not support local control, while HA and HomeKit support Thread and Matter and do support local control.

dm_me_dogs 3y ago
HomeKit-over-Thread and Matter-over-Thread has been pretty okay in my experience, using HomePods and an Apple TV 4K as the border routers. I'm using Home Assistant, and the HomePods control everything nicely. Setup is a little weird (you have to set up your devices in HomeKit first, remove and then add again in Home Assistant without resetting) but they work great. My only complaint is that HomePod Software and tvOS updates tend to bork the devices until I reboot HA, but that takes 10 ish seconds so not a big deal.
santialbo 3y ago
I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. For that reason I decided to go with what's cheap and works today, which is Zigbee.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. When you compare apples-to-apples, there's no price penalty — for example, a Leviton Decora smart dimmer is $56 for Zigbee or $50 for Matter. Kasa's Matter dimmer switch is $27, and I see $3 Matter devices on AliExpress. Matter and Thread don't currently match Zigbee in terms of device diversity, but that's just a matter of time. > Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. Even hundreds of Matter devices using Wi-Fi would collectively use an insignificant portion of your Wi-Fi network's throughput.

hiddencost 3y ago

I've been using zigbee for industrial applications. The security angle is particularly appreciated by a factory that wants to control their vents from one button without running tons of copper wiring. They're not going to put that on their network.

apapapa 3y ago
If their only worry is using less copper, I am worried.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  If it's done well, less copper might mean easy maintenance, more room for other stuff, extensibility, etc. "one wire per thing" installations move the difficulty out of the software and onto physically keeping track of all those wires.

sdflhasjd 3y ago

When I started I had a good mix of all 3 (WiFi, Zigbee & Z-wave). 5 years layer, everything's slowly been absorbed into Zigbee. WiFi isn't a mesh network, so there's extremities with poor reliability. Z-wave just seemed to suffer from poor device availability, and everything turned out to be more expensive with no real benefit. Also, one other thing to mention with WiFi and Bluetooth is how it's basically a massive red flag, a stamp of "hey, this device needs our shit app to use." It's just a shame there's no Zigbee ESP32 equivalent for all my hobby bits.

shellfishgene 3y ago
There is [1], but it's not open source and 'advanced' functions, like battery operation, cost money. Also this [2] project is promising, but in the early stages I think. Also I guess newer ESP32 support zigbee in principle, there is some discussion of adding this to ESPHome. [1] https://ptvo.info/zigbee-configurable-firmware-features/ https://ptvo.info/zigbee-configurable-firmware-features/ [2] https://github.com/ffenix113/zigbee_home https://github.com/ffenix113/zigbee_home

sitzkrieg 3y ago

becoming more and more impressed at the number of devices being crammed into each home clogging up the already decimated ism bands

eternityforest 3y ago
But at the same time more and more stuff that actually uses heavy bandwidth is moving out into 5GHz and other high frequency bands.

mlichvar 3y ago

My current understanding of the wireless technologies wrt to home automation: - wifi is most reliable, secure, easiest to debug, but usable only for mains-powered devices due to higher energy consumption - bluetooth LE has lowest energy consumption, best for unreliable broadcasting of data (e.g. temperature sensors), but has shorter range - zigbee is best for battery-powered devices where reliable communication is needed and is initiated by the device (e.g. switch, window/door sensor) - zwave is best for battery-powered devices which need to quickly receive data (e.g. door lock or directly controller radiator valves), but security seems problematic according to some reports

santialbo 3y ago
Add to wifi that if you plan on having a lot of devices your router might commit seppuku. Zigbee can hold hundreds of devices (as long a you have zb routers in your mesh)
burnerthrow008 3y ago
Regardless of theory, my experience has been that WiFi communications are significantly less reliable than Zigbee or BLE, and typically have worse latency to boot. Unless you have a bunch of WiFi APs around your house, practical range with Zigbee is also better than WiFi because powered Zigbee nodes (like lightbulbs and switched outlets) act as mesh routers. One additional benefit of Zigbee and Wave is the possibility of creating battery-less devices, like the Philips Hue Tap switch, which uses a hammer and piezoelectric generator for power.

anonuser1234 3y ago

I actually went down the zigbee rabbit hole with my house last week. I tried the best selling zigbee motion sensors on amazon, however, they only worked within line of sight of the zigbee antenna. I then tried the Phillips hue motion sensors. They worked flawlessly throughout my home.

devonkim 3y ago

One thing I found a bit unsettling about some products is how manufacturers can say they support a standard when they’re really using it as a basis for a proprietary lock-in strategy. I didn’t realize the standards were so loose until I started researching some newer devices to support Home Assistant, namely the Aqara U100 which seems to require the Aqara hub to be able to support standard Zigbee when it’s advertised as supporting Zigbee https://community.home-assistant.io/t/aqara-u100-smart-lock/579805 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/aqara-u100-smart-lock/...

yurishimo 3y ago
Is this true of Zwave? From what I understood, one of the reasons that zwave devices are substantially more expensive, is that the licensing and certification requirements are much more strict. There also isn't a "first party" zwave hub that I can find. The Zwave alliance seems to only deal with the protocol and licensing, thus, any hub that claims to support zwave, will work with any zwave device.
- organsnyder 3y ago
  That's been my experience so far. I have ~20 Z-wave devices from a variety of manufacturers. They all work very well with Home Assistant, and many of them now support firmware updating directly through HA as well.
- gh02t 3y ago
  No. Loosely speaking, Zwave pretty strictly defines a list of device types (lightbulb, thermometer, etc) and supported formats for read/writes to it by device type (turn on/off, reports temperature,...). The API to handle those is then standardized, and the device manufacturer just fills in the code to implement the calls appropriate to the device. Devices are more-or-less "self-describing." Baseline Zigbee is a bit more freeform (it's not solely a home automation protocol) and is a transport for whatever data format manufacturers want to send, with devices implementing their own details on top. Later on there was an attempt to standardize the communication format for home automation similar to how Zwave works and it was somewhat successful, but manufacturers still have a bad habit of having deviations and quirks. The standard is also not as rigidly enforced like it is with Zwave. Again this is all simplified and there's more nuance but that's generally the breakdown. Practically speaking you'll have more consistency with Zwave devices, but nowadays Zigbee devices have a lot more variety. Support for (and quality of support for) new devices in Zigbee can be a bit more hit-or-miss, but it's usually pretty good nowadays with Zigbee having more marketshare/momentum. I use both, I have more problems with Zigbee, but I also have more devices for it by virtue of their being more choices.

yesimahuman 3y ago

My zigbee devices are the best part of my smart home setup (with home assistant). They always work, battery life is ridiculous, and they’re interoperable. Have only had issues with one motion detector from a brand that has otherwise been rock solid. If I had only known about zigbee before I swore off smart home tech (instead of wifi and proprietary hubs) the last time I tried I would have had a lot more fun!

bhaney 3y ago

Apparently I'm one of the rare few people who fell on the WiFi side of the WiFi/Zigbee smart home war. All of my lightbulbs, occupancy sensors, etc just connect directly to WiFi, and run custom firmware that I wrote so I know exactly what they're doing and how to control them. They make no attempt to access the wider Internet, but they're all on a vlan without Internet access anyway. It feels like introducing Zigbee to this would just be an extra hub device taking up space, acting as an extra point of failure, and making it more complicated to develop against my devices. As it stands now I can easily manually control devices by piping crap into netcat if I need to for some reason, since they're all just normal IP networked devices. I think I would have to jump though extra hoops to do similar things with Zigbee. Is the main aspect driving people to Zigbee just that off the shelf consumer smart devices that use WiFi tend to be annoying dogshit, and Zigbee keeps manufacturers in line better? I don't see any reliability or simplicity benefits to it, just the market poisoning WiFi and Zigbee being the only worthwhile alternative.

karlgkk 3y ago
For zigbee, you could either obtain a zigbee/usb dongle (interact over virtual serial port to send zigbee commands - tons of libraries exist to provide an api surface), or obtain a hub and figure out its api. Zigbee also has functional mesh features that wifi doesn't. One is designed for high bandwidth single point communication while the other is designed for low bandwidth long range.
Tomuus 3y ago
ZigBee is a mesh network, this is very important in many situations eg. battery powered or large area
dzikimarian 3y ago
There's at least a few interesting points for zigbee: * If you use universal hub like Home Assistant, they are pretty interoperable between various manufacturers * Devices don't have direct connection to internet (again esp. with HA), so better privacy, they are faster (no cloud lag) and do not depend on internet connection * Battery life is way better for small devices * Mesh is nice when you have bigger area to cover * If you have to use shitty ISP router, it will have issues with large number of devices * Usually easy push-to-pair setup And there isn't many downsides - one time cost of some kind of coordinator and very slightly pricier equipment.

t43562 3y ago

I have had a rotten time so far trying to get anything to happen with my Tradfri lights - I started off assuming that all of this could be done from the commandline - no not without difficulty. How do you pair your computer's zigbee with the lightbulb? Who @#$#$ knows. The button - how do you EVER get that to pair or do you? I'm so hacked off with it I cannot go back and try again for a while but IMO it all has a very long way before it gets as simple even as bluetooth and that was always pretty horrible itself (from the commandline at least).

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

Zigbee continues to be the only reliable thing in my household. I switched to the IKEA Dirigera hub for most of it and it's pretty stable. Cannot say that about almost anything else and I tried a lot.

apapapa 3y ago

So functionality isn't the best part of your smart home? For me it is a wirelessly-controlled deadbolt

tw04 3y ago

+1 for Hubitat - assuming they don't sell out their business model is perfect. They sell the base hardware which you'll need to upgrade over time as new z-wave/zigbee/other protocols come out. Additionally they will sell a subscription for backing up the hub configuration to the cloud, and essentially creating a reverse proxy to manage their hubs remotely. The hub can operate completely offline, or if you're technically capable of setting up a reverse proxy/vpn/whatever to manage it you can do that as well. They provide timely updates, the hub for the most part has been rock solid, and the upgrade path between generations is pretty painless. I've got a mix of both zigbee, z-wave, and a handful of wifi devices (that were free, I would never ever spend money on a wifi smart device if I could avoid it). As an added bonus if you were a smartthings user, you can migrate your automation/drivers/etc with little to no modifications. Think about them as smart things 2.0. www.hubitat.com Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a fan.

m463 3y ago

question - what system would you recommend for people in high density housing?

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

I started domotics with X10, and migrated time to time to some newfangled solution once they stabilized. Right now, I use Home Assistant (HA) with Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, BLE, and LoRa. Some talk directly to HA, some go to MQTT, some through ESPHome, some through HACS integrations. Current winners are Z-Wave and Zigbee. Both very much depend on the manufacturer's implementation. I have some Zigbee or Z-Wave devices that choke randomly, but provide too many niceties (I am looking at you Aqara). I am leery of WiFi solutions as many have noted. I block all access to the world, and on some sites where I have domotics, there is no internet most of the time. I have been delighted with Martin Jerry and Shelly WiFi switches. They work like fresh butter on a crispy garlic toast in a cold morning. Many others on the other hand are super heavy with outbound traffic. (Why does a thermostat need to "check for firmware" daily?) There is something about Matter that just puts me off. Not the technology mind you, but the invisible business posture on how Matter may end up functioning. "You can use our Matter our device any way you want to and can connect to anything, as long as it goes through our Matter Commissioner first"... alas, I might not have to worry about this maturing.

walth 3y ago

> Z-Wave is in some ways the better pick going forward Z-Wave unfortunately is already dead. The legacy certification process, the higher cost chips, and the global frequency bifurcation.

password4321 3y ago

Related today: Home Assistant: Three years later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345122