Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available (opens in new tab)

The single protocol throughout my house was my primary goal too, just to reduce complexity of having to deal with multiple hubs and integrations... but with my new house I did away with that.

Lutron Caseta for physical in-wall switches, IKEA Tradfri for cheap motion sensors/lighs, Philips Hue for more expensive motion sensors/lights, and a whole slew of Thread enabled devices, all controlled from HomeKit.

I don't really notice that its a bunch of different protocols/wireless standards underneath. I can control it from a single location which also makes it easier for guests/people visiting. Hand them an iPad with the Home app and they can control the house, or add them a Guest to my home on their own iOS devices.

I do miss some of the more advanced Home Assistant stuff I was doing, but overall the experience has been much cleaner, and with almost 0 lag.

I was an early adopter for sure. This was back in 2016ish when I installed all of the devices. All of the devices were Z-Wave+ (specifically bought for that) but many of them did not support the newer encryption, and it ended up being a mixed network of devices for sure. Only the last few devices I bought supported the new encryption standard that was being rolled out at the time. I ended up getting a new Z-Wave hub that supported it to be able to securely enroll my new devices... but all it did was destabilize the network further.

It just left a horrible taste in my mouth, and once bitten, twice shy is definitely the case here.

The other thing that made things slow was sleepy devices that would wake up to report status. Things like motion sensors that also reported humidity, light levels, temperature and more (I do wish I could find a sensor like that for Zigbee/Thread... the multiple things in one was kinda nice). Every time they would wake up to report it would flood the network with traffic. And with each additional sensor I would have to tweak how often that would happen (and thus how accurate the data was over time) to reduce the amount of chatter on the network.

I'm also running a Zwave network and it's highly responsive with around 50 devices. A friend of mine is running a few hundred devices and I haven't heard him complain much about it, all of his actions/triggers/etc seem to execute pretty much instantly. I'm going to guess that his network topology has a lot devices that are only accessible by repeaters, or aren't using Zwave+. Zwave is pretty much _the standard_ for large professional smart home installations and scales pretty well if implemented properly.

Encryption was insanely slow when I first tried it on my Inovelli Red Series switches. Without encryption it was an instant (feeling) response time.

If you have good wifi, you don't need to wait. I have a two story house and the floor plan looks like a T-shape, so I basically have 6 different zones. I pulled Cat6 everywhere for decent AP coverage. Right now I have about 80 Meross light switches and dimmers, 6 wifi blinds, wifi garage openers, Ecobee thermostats, multiple Apple TVs, ton of personal devices - easily over 200 devices on the LAN, most of them connected to HomeAssistant. Instant status updates with no problems except for the occasional need to reboot a wall switch due to power issues. Meross has a tiny hidden button at the bottom of each switch that instantly reboots the switch.

I bought Meross products off Amazon in bulk and absolutely love them. I have single pole switches, 3 way switches, single pole dimmers, 3 way dimmers, and a few smart plugs, power strips, and RGB bulbs.

PS: I even have a few Z-Wave devices and bought Zooz Hub ZST10-700 to work with HomeAssistant. I use these to measure power consumption on a garage freezer and a space heater. As long as the Z-Wave devices are close to the hub, there's no issue. But oddly enough they sometimes send negative power usage data which HA complains about.

The funniest part is he have to use two smart thermostat in each room and he realize that one smart thermostat heat up the other one and fucked up the temperature reading.

Z-Wave runs on 900MHz which is plenty far away from any commonly used WiFi bands.

Zwave talks on 800-900MhZ and doesn't share medium with ethernet frames, so there isn't a concept of VLANs. Each Device meshes with anything and everything in its immediate broadcast range to provide some elasticity to the network. I can imagine at some high point of devices that the medium could become saturated

As the other commenter said it's not a LAN issue. Z-Wave is a mesh radio protocol totally independent of the LAN. There are in fact issues with older Z-Wave specs and versions bogging down due to congestion.

The problem isn't the network, it's the number of devices.

"Z-Wave Alliance: Source Code Now Open and Widely Available to Members"

At least it's under a BSD 3-clause license.

"The goal of the source code project is to provide a rich development environment containing relevant source code and sample applications under BSD 3 License."

https://z-wavealliance.org/z-wave-alliance-completes-z-wave-...

z-wave is kind of competing with zigbee for low power mid-range wireless standard for smart home or smart building since like 20 years ago? then we have low power bluetooth and low-power wifi joined the party.

z-wave was proprietary which did not help its deployments, but still I recall it was the most deployed low power wireless devices for IoT. I worked on zigbee and never liked it. I wish z-wave was more open back in time.

Did not track what's going on these days for low power mid-range wireless, general feeling is that zigbee did not take off, zwave is used as before(you license it and put it to your sensors), and more and more are using low-power wifi and even bluetooth instead.

Z-Wave stands out because many of this devices can act as repeaters and extend your range. They also offer security which others do not. They also work really well but can get really expensive.

You're looking at 2-5x the cost of a Zigbee device. Zigbee is not without it's problems but I've been able to solve mine with $14 repeaters while my Z-Wave problems have complicated solutions and still might be solvable.

Z-Wave differentiates itself from other IoT networks in that it's a closed proprietary network that you access by purchasing their proprietary hardware. This offers network stability and complete interoperability between devices because it's all controlled by a single vendor. Z-Wave device manufacturers interface with the proprietary hardware to provide state and receive command.

Many vendors make USB dongles with Z-Wave Controller interfaces hanging off of them that you can interface using a terminal. These dongles allow anyone to make their own Gateway for controlling other Z-Wave devices.

Because the interface is completely controlled and locked down, it means vendors can't embrace/extend Z-Wave or lock their devices down to their own proprietary controller.

There are some downsides to this setup, like distributing updated firmware for devices is challenging. No one wants to hand their blobs over to opensource projects to allow them to push updates.

I don't own ZWave devices, but comments here seem to question their superiority.

The range and battery life is likely due to the lower-frequency it uses, which is less congested and longer range. Typically, this will translate to a lower power usage (better battery life).

> longer battery life

Meanwhile, this HN discussion has people telling others to never use battery-powered Z-Wave devices, or it'll be laggy...

Thread is a mesh protocol on 6LoWPAN, which in turn is based on the same underlying 802.11.4 as Zigbee in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum.

Its claims to fame is having reasonable response times/batteru life and being based on IPv6. Being based on IP allows devices to talk to one another, and for bridging those devices to the broader network and potentially to the internet with clear layer separation.

Matter is a IP-based IoT discovery and use standard. Devices advertise Thread and/or Wifi support for wireless support. It also standardizes onboarding (I know BLE is an option there) and the underlying security, and mandates certain capabilities such as supporting multiple 'admin' software at once.

Devices using other wireless tech can also theoretically work with Matter with a gateway that does protocol translation, supports device onboarding, and then exposes them onto the network.

Thread is a mesh IPv6 based network that operates over the 2.4 GHz ISM band but is not WiFi. Matter is a communication protocol built on top of Thread, WiFi, and BLE (and potentially others in the future).

Thread and ZigBee operate in the 2.4 Ghz and also 833/915 Mhz although in practice I've never seen any devices that explicitly claim to be using the sub Ghz bands. It's not WiFi, it's IEEE 802.15.4. Matter supports devices connected through WiFi, Thread and Ethernet with BT provisioning.

I'm using no cloud Zigbee home automation. Seems to be very reliable and has really great range thanks to the mesh networking. It's also really simple.

Zigbee allows using multiple vendors with ease, not tied to just one manufacturer.

Again, no internet connection required.

> With Zigbee, AIUI you get a mostly closed system locked in to whichever Zigbee vendor you chose.

No, all devices should work with other vendors. Some vendors don't play as nice, however. The Zigbee light-link spec should allow all lights to work with all light controllers (eg zigged remotes on the wall). Any "true" hub should work with all zigged devices too. Some minor company's hub may not support all products, but thats if they don't comply with the protocol - ZWave theoretically has that problem.

Zigbee is probably more "open" since the protocol has less certification requirements. The only main bifurcation is that "Zigbee" and "Zigbee Light Link" are slightly different and you may end up with a "ZLL" hub that doesn't support non-light devices.

> And if my Internet connection is down, or even the controller is down, the system still functions with graceful degradation only.

Zigbee supports this behavior. You can pair lights/remotes for example with no hub required. Its usually advertised as a graceful upgrade path instead of a degradation path.

"Matter" has basically everyone:

https://csa-iot.org/members/

The new Thread protocol (part of Matter) is basically Zigbee on steroids which gets it up to parity with Z-wave. The reason to choose Z-wave over Thread is that Z-wave works now and has many devices available to buy, while Thread works in theory and the devices are very few in number. Thread devices are due out in force next year. So this actually is perfect timing for Z-wave to make this move now, right as the first wave of Thread devices are approaching.

Z-Wave is definitely the better protocol (vs Zigbee), but Matter is partially based on Zigbee so everyone expects Z-Wave to lose.

I don't agree, I think Z-wave will work with Matter using bridging.

> My prediction is everything will ship with a "matter" icon on it, but support will only be vertical silo, maybe even worse than things are now.

There's already available evidence that contradicts that prediction. Eve[1] is rolling out a firmware update for Matter support that makes their devices usable across all Matter supported platforms. There are some features that aren't yet available at the Matter level so those will remain in their own app for now. Despite being iOS-only previously with Matter support they're now also reaching Android devices and are working on an Android app for it too to cover the missing features in Matter.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505097/matter-eve-firm...

> If they're IPv6 then they're globally addressable, which is bad bad bad. How is that going to be mitigated?

I think you need to read up on IPv6 a bit. There are whole IPv6 ranges set aside that are not globally routable / part of the global unicast range[1].

Thread has link-local and mesh-local addresses. The global is only gained through SLAAC/DHCP or manual configuration by an administrator so by default no, your devices aren't accessible to the outside world. And if you do have routable IPv6 in your network, you should already have a firewall on your network edge for this because all your existing devices would already be exposed. The addressing primer[2] for Thread also applies to Matter for further details.

[1]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-add...

[2]: https://openthread.io/guides/thread-primer/ipv6-addressing

> If they're IPv6 then they're globally addressable

All ipv6 addresses are routeable but that doesn't mean reachable. Link local and Unique local addresses are examples of non-global ipv6 addresses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address

Using lower frequencies also means you're not stepping on the 2.4GHz band, so you won't have interference from wifi or microwaves or whatever else.