Z-Wave Long Range and its mile-long capabilities will arrive next year - Ars Technica
Z-Wave Long Range and its mile-long capabilities will arrive next year - Ars Technica
Few homes will need it, but the (literal) edge cases are quite intriguing.
I'm deeply confused. I have a shitload of Zooz stuff that supports Long Range. Does the whole star topology and everything. Is this some sort of new development? Or did the author miss the long range stuff that's been available for a year now?
EDIT: many commentors over on Ars are also confused.
14KNX + zWave + esphome (especially when it gets matter support) will be the ultimate combo of reliability and flexibility!
13Zwave is my first choice for new devices. Love that I can just scan the little QR code, turn it on, and have it come up in HA. Super-long range, I'm going to have to look for outdoor sensors.
But I'm also thinking - my parents are starting to have health problems - that a mile could even be a family member or friend's house. Not as intrusive as cameras, but an easy way to see that they're up and about...making coffee, TV on, or whatever, and not (potentially) collapsed in the shower unable to get up.
10I'd rather set up a point-to-point wireless link with directional antennas and exactly two base stations than rely on every little IoT device having long range. Better yet, such a link could be high-bandwidth and capable of handling things like data backups and Internet access failover.
9LoraWAN
5
I'd be more inclined to trust LoRa for anything that needs that sort of distance.
5I spent several weeks evaluating options and really wanted to use LoRa for controlling some stuff in a detached machine shop, but I just couldn't find reasonably priced sensors, switches, and gateways (or access points or whatever you call them in LoRa parlance). I seem to recall that one of the major integrations was cloud-polling only which was a huge no-go (same reason I didn't buy in heavily into Yolink, I require 100% local control).
Do you use LoRa? I'd love to hear what you use (brands and vendors to buy stuff from) if so. I try to have at least two different technologies controlling an area. That way, my zwave-js-ui pod occasionally shitting the bed won't completely break an area.
8I've used the Heltec Lora v2 and v3 which are ESP32 devices and you can put ESPhome on them. The V2 are delicate little things and I'm pretty sure they're static sensitive, so if you get anything, get the V3. Of course, when they went V2 to V3, they didn't keep it pin compatible because fuck me, I guess. But I fixed that and now I'm on V3 devices. You can put an external 9 or 13 dBi gain antenna on these and I've gotten a few miles with them, LOS. I use these on pumping systems to communicate between the trough and pump on long pasture cattle watering lines.
If I want to go longer range or have some trees in the way, I've been using ebyte E32 standalone (UART) radios. You can get 25 miles out of those with good direction YAGI antennas, as they can run at 1W. I have an amateur radio license so I'm legal to use that power if I don't encrypt it, which is fine because all I'm doing with it is sending telemetry (gates, pumps, temperature) on the farm or between equipment for RTK correction on my AgOpenGPS units.
4
Sweet! Wonder what the use cases are with that kinda range. I guess if you own a lot of property it would be nice.
3I’ve read Shelly has bad life expectancy. (Don’t know about alternatives)
2In what way?
2Read of a guy who fitted his house with them and had to replace about a third or half after 3-4 years
Edit: After looking up “Shelly life expectancy” I’ve read more people who lose after 3 years functionality
1
I've only ever had 1 Shelly go out on me and it's still installed. It's a 2.5 that stopped speaking wifi. It was set to detached mode to keep some hue bulbs powered. Now the physical switches are no use but it still works so I just left it for now.
1@sit
Five year warranty on Pro devices https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=774868644853056&id=100069897832443&set=a.4810975542301681The warranty doesn’t include the worktime spent to fumble the Shellys out of the wall and back in.
2
Zigbee is a mess so this is great news
2