Z-Wave Alliance Says Z-Wave Source Code Project Is Complete, Now Open And Widely Available To Members (z-wavealliance.org) 51
The Z-Wave Alliance, the Standards Development Organization (SDO) dedicated to advancing the smart home and Z-Wave technology, today announced the completion of the Z-Wave Source Code project, which has been published and made available on GitHub to Alliance members. From a report: The Z-Wave Source Code Project opens development of Z-Wave and enables members to contribute code to shape the future of the protocol under the supervision of the new OS Work Group (OSWG). The goal of the project is to provide a rich development environment that contains the relevant source code and sample applications to those seeking to play a direct role in the advancement of the Z-Wave standard. The quality and interoperability of products utilizing Z-Wave Source Code will also be enforced by a new mandatory Silicon & Stack Certification program. Full Z-Wave certification will continue to test and certify for Z-Wave S2 security, network connectivity, range, battery life, and interoperability including backwards and forwards compatibility.
"The Z-Wave Alliance is deeply committed to the global smart home market," said Mitch Klein, Executive Director of the Z-Wave Alliance. "This year the smart home conversations have focused largely on Matter. Shiny and new, and with big brands supporting the initiative, Matter is bringing a lot of attention to the smart home. This makes it easy to overlook Z-Wave as the most established, trusted, and secure smart home protocol, that also happens to have the largest certified interoperable ecosystem in the market. We firmly expect that Z-Wave will play a key role in connecting devices and delivering the experience users really want."
"The Z-Wave Alliance is deeply committed to the global smart home market," said Mitch Klein, Executive Director of the Z-Wave Alliance. "This year the smart home conversations have focused largely on Matter. Shiny and new, and with big brands supporting the initiative, Matter is bringing a lot of attention to the smart home. This makes it easy to overlook Z-Wave as the most established, trusted, and secure smart home protocol, that also happens to have the largest certified interoperable ecosystem in the market. We firmly expect that Z-Wave will play a key role in connecting devices and delivering the experience users really want."
Move over poor person (Score:3)
...which has been published and made available on GitHub to Alliance members
Meaning: if you pay through the nose, you can have access to it. Kind of like USB: if you want the official specs, it's not cheap.
Re: Move over poor person (Score:2)
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Re:Move over poor person (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is: as someone who has Smartified his home to the gills, I found that interoperability is not all that important if you have a capable hub. Let your devices communicate on whatever protocol they like: Z-Wave, their own weird ass brand of Zigbee, Thread, WiFi, ensure that there is a plugin for that device for your particular hub, and do your integration there. In practice, integration usually involves a bit more than just 1 device talking to another one, and you'll need the hub anyway.
Don't think you'll be picking only 1 protocol either: no single manufacturer will offer all that you'll want. We have curtains on Z-Wave and 433MHz, lights on Z-Wave and Zigbee, blinds on Zigbee, window openers on a proprietary protocol, a serial interface to read the electric and gas meters, and a few devices on WiFi. There are protocols that I will not pick however: those that cannot be made to work with the hub of my choice. And that hub better allow users to write their own plugins for devices: that is the best guarantee for compatibility.
My advice: pick an open hub with a good user community and a decent app. Then just buy whatever equipment works for you, regardless of protocol. With Z-Wave and Zigbee it helps to get several devices to strengthen the mesh radio network.
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I've done a little bit of tinkering around and none of the silly articles I read EVER pointed out what you just said regarding the hub and it's ability to communicate with a wide variety of protocols. Also really good to know that you can't expect to find a single manufacturer for all your needs.
If I had mod points I would of.
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And yet somehow Lutron's extra-proprietary systems seem to have a far bigger JFW factor than pretty much anything else. In the real world, they absolutely exceed their "official" specs on range. Meanwhile, everything else falls far short seems to get its signal blocked by open air. If Lutron actually made all the devices I wanted, I'd use nothing else. But since they really only do light switches, I have to put up with everything else and its questionable reliability to cover all my bases.
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In contract, I'm running the same network now on Z-Way. This is much faster and the queue handl
Node-red on a Pi for different protocols (Score:1)
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>My advice: pick an open hub with a good user community and a decent app.
Would you have any recommendations? Thanks!
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Consider ANSI or IEEE stnadards - you can pay to buy them, or just get the latest draft. Most people just use the drafts.
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Yep and just like USB it will fail and not be available to anyone in any way. Oh wait that's not what happened at all with USB, because as it turns out you don't actually need the spec to implement something. Basically all modern development is abstracted. Only large companies roll their own PHYs, and for everyone else buying a $1 part that does the heavy lifting for you is more than enough to bring basically any product to market, no matter how poor you are.
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I thought all the USB stuff was open. Whenever I've looked for documentation I've found it on their website. Admittedly not checked the USB3.x/4 stuff.
Survey (Score:1)
How many readers actually knew what Z-Wave was without doing a search? ;)
I never heard of it. That's just how it goes though. Obscure, niche technologies get no explanation, but with well-known ubiquitous technologies we'll get a detailed reminder that e.g. USB is the Universal Serial Bus standard, which specifies the electronic and physical implementations of the most common way to connect mice and keyboards to computers.
Spoiler: it's a wireless protocol
Re:Survey (Score:5, Informative)
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"Done home automation" seems vague.
I haven't created or attempted to sell any products, so if that's what you meant by "done home automation" then no, I haven't done it. But I've set up smart lights and plugs and a robot vacuum that integrated to Alexa and to IFTTT, with different IOT tech on various devices (ZigBee at first, direct wifi on some others).
Still never heard of Z-Wave before today, and still thoroughly unsure if or why I should care about it. TFS doesn't convince.
Re:Survey (Score:4, Informative)
You've implemented ZigBee devices and still have never heard of Z-Wave before today? Color me skeptical, but whatever.
ZigBee and Z-Wave are two tools to solve the same problem: Low power mesh networks for smart devices. Different wavelength RF and different protocols. And it's like arguing between Apple and Android, both sides will defend their reason for choosing their preferred one to the death. If you're building out a home automation solution you usually go one way or the other, if you're already committed to ZigBee there's no real benefit to switch to Z-Wave or vice-versa. Hubs like the Wink looked to bridge the gaps by supporting both radios/protocols, allowing you to run both together "seamlessly". Either of them are (were?) better choices than WiFi because they use a ton less power. (I only say "were" because I don't keep up to speed enough to know if some of the newer wifi tech has fixed the problems these two have stepped in to solve.)
Re: Survey (Score:2)
You didn't read what I wrote, but what you expected me to write. I am not a hardware guy. I am a consumer.
I have never *implemented* ZigBee or any other IoT protocol. I have *set up devices* that use ZigBee, i.e., bought off the shelf, plugged in and done configuration shit.
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Ok, imprecise choice of words on my part. I meant "implemented" as a synonym for "installed".
I only know of them both because I spent the time to learn about them. I started out with a Z-Wave door lock I received as a gift, wanting to expand things I learned about the other options. I wouldn't expect a normal consumer to know the difference, it just surprises me that someone on a nerd site is familiar with one protocol but has never even heard of its competitor. But whatever, you say you've never heard of
Z-Wave is Well Known (Score:3)
I thought Z-Wave and Zigbee were well-known as the competing smart home wireless protocols for devices that don't talk WiFi directly. These are the devices that require some sort of smart hub to connect to the network. Both use very low power compared to WiFi. As mentioned in the summary, all the big players are expecting Matter to take over the market in this area.
Of course, if you're not interested in smart home devices, that would explain why you might have missed this.
Personally, for the few devices
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Although Z-Wave IS a wireless protocol... that really doesn't give much context. Z-Wave is a wireless protocol for home automation.
I have a bunch of Z-Wave stuff installed around the house along with devices on other standards. I suspect that others have largely come to the conclusion that I have, all this home automation nonsense sounds cool but just isn't something you need much in practice and the various competing standards are annoying as hell.
Also... everything wants to be the controller and control d
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I suspect that others have largely come to the conclusion that I have, all this home automation nonsense sounds cool but just isn't something you need much in practice
Oh gosh, I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. You can have my automation devices when you pry them out of my cold dead house. Are any of them necessary? Absolutely not, I obviously got by just fine without them before. But it would take a pretty compelling argument to get me to go back.
Just dumb shit like forgetting to turn off the outside light where I let my dogs outside. I usually never notice it till after I've shut all the other lights off and crawled into bed. Instead of crawling my ass ba
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"Just dumb shit like forgetting to turn off the outside light where I let my dogs outside. I usually never notice it till after I've shut all the other lights off and crawled into bed. Instead of crawling my ass back downstairs and out throught the garage to shut the damn thing off I can one-eye it from my phone."
That is essentially the one thing I've found worthwhile in all of it, turning out the lights/adjusting the thermostat without having to get out of bed. That is great but does it justify the hundred
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There are gobs of standards in the 110V world no one has heard of.
in the 220V world, we gravitate to standards and interoperability faster. As such, we had 3 primary choices.
- 433Mhz which was just a pathetic mess
- Zigbee which basically won the instant that Ikea used them
- ZNet which was widely chosen by companies not trying to be compatible with Philips Hue
Now, not a single "common home brand" makes
widely available TO MEMBERS!? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Widely available to intrepid members who visit the cellar of their local planning office, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
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This is obviously some strange use of the words "Open Source" that I wasn't previously aware of
If they would have done this ten years ago... (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe Z-Wave would still be relevant today. Instead, it got massacred by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for home device networking.
Too little, too late.
Re:If they would have done this ten years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. If you look into your consumer junk, sure everything is bluetooth and wifi. But for actual smart home / building automation, z-wave (and zigbee) are huge, and quite a few of the so called "wifi" devices are actually z-wave or zigbee with one of the devices on the network implementing a wifi bridge.
Very few home automation / smart home devices natively communicate with each other over wifi. They are usually limited to that one off device that you need to solve ${specific_problem} rather than get implemented in any actual smart home network.
Re:If they would have done this ten years ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hubless devices that use WiFi stop working when the Internet goes down. Also it's a huge security risk, you have to give the devices your WiFi password which means that and your usage patterns and everything from your network drives are being sent to China. Also your devices might get hacked to participate in botnets. No thank you!
Just give me Zigbee or Z-Wave.
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Install Tasmota firmware on them. Local only, no internet connection required. Set to a dedicated WiFi network that is isolated and has no internet access.
Re: If they would have done this ten years ago... (Score:1)
If you setup an isolated wifi network with no access to the internet then your WiFi devices like your phone don't have internet either.
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I have a separate network for my phone etc. Single AP, two SSIDs.
Re:If they would have done this ten years ago... (Score:4, Interesting)
Z-Wave is more a competitor to ZigBee.
These are protocols with some characteristics of interest:
-Exceedingly low power consumption, making BLE look like a power hog by comparison
-Mesh networking, each participant in the network extends the range of the network a bit more
-Common device profiles, a 'light dimmer' is controlled by the same command sequences regardless of brand
Beyond this, I am wary of 'WiFi'. It can be good stuff (e.g. OpenGarage is a Wifi garage door opener), but it is often cloud locked. A zigbee/z-wave can not be cloud locked.
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The lack of open standards and cheap modules is an issue. I looked at both the Z standards and ended up building my own network with CC1101 wireless modems.
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Last I checked (which was a bit back I admit) many of the things on Z-Wave never really got put on Wi-fi, such as devices to retrofit existing switches and controls. Zwave did have the advantage of being an adhoc system. Also under Zwave we had simple devices we could use to trigger macros on the hub, avoiding the need to screw around with a phone and apps.
Who wants to go hunting for their phone when they crawl in bed? With Zwave I could just reach over and press a button to trigger a macro that turned off
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With the new SmartStart protocol, you just unscrew the wall plate and scan the QR code on the front of the light switch with your phone.
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That is still a pain in the arse but that isn't the protocol's fault I suppose. A smart user would save the QR codes and keep them on a central sheet so they didn't have to run around removing wall plates.
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Wifi suffers from the primary issue that it's hard to change your wifi password. If you do, you've got to run around all those wifi devices and go through some sort of unique, vendor and product specific re-pairing dance.
Zwave and Zigbee use encrypted comms to their respective hubs - you can't fiddle with it in any way. Once a device is paired, it'll stay paired. As such, from a usability point of view, the z-protocols offer a better experience.
What (in my experience) the z-protocols lack is features in the
Surely a real wifi device is cheap enough now? (Score:1)
Why would anyone want to use Zwave's proprietary shite ?
Re:Surely a real wifi device is cheap enough now? (Score:5, Informative)
Devices with real wifi are about $2 now, aren't they ?
Why would anyone want to use Zwave's proprietary shite ?
For one power consumption. A Z-Wave device is incredibly low power. It makes Bluetooth LE look like a super fat hog. Zwave can operate on a couple of AA batteries for two YEARS. Wi-Fi couldn't get close.
The second reason is that Z-wave is mesh. And if the internet/network go down it still works just fine. And even if a device (or several devices) go offline the mesh just keeps going.
Someone needs to quite talking "shite" and get educated. ;-)
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Your house has neutral wires in the switchbox? Most still don't.
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Just because a device uses wifi doesn't mean it's not proprietary nor does it mean it is easy to integrate with other devices who use wifi.
There are more wifi bulb brands than I care to remember, and every one of them come with their own app. The only thing that sort of works if it is a OEM from Tuya, then you can use the Tuya app.
Z-wave has one great thing I enjoy: Direct association. I can (with almost any z-wave-controller) tell lightswitch A to talk directly to light B.
The problems with Z-wave are sever
Z-Wave vs. Zigbee/CHIP/Matter (Score:2)
Z-Wave has been more proprietary - you need to certify your product, which requires more money (gained through licensing, which generally means slightly higher prices to the consumer) to go through the hoops. The announcement is more pointed at companies debating Z-Wave or the next big thing - Matter.
Zigbee's been looser on standards. It pivoted by going to CHIP/Matter (Zigbee Alliance becomes Connectivity Standards Alliance, but still supports Zigbee). Matter's main push is security, but ...there's a cost
Missed the Bus (Score:2)
The thing that really infuriates me is that I came up with a thing I wanted to prototype via Z-Wave I called the "ZoomBox" -- a boombox that incorporated Z-Wave for volume co