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What’s the Matter with the smart home?
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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I guess I stand corrected-ish. I've always ignored Z-Wave because it was a closed ecosystem. But upon reading more into it, seems like it's only partially open. They only opened certain parts of the spec for interoperability in late 2016, the standard was ratified by the ITU in Dec 2019, and they formed the non-profit Z-Wave Alliance only in 2020. They apparently made the source code available end of last year, but it's only available to the Z-Wave Alliance members.
https://z-wavealliance.org/z-wave-alliance-completes-z-wave-source-code-project-for-alliance-members/
So, still not ideal IMO, but better than what it was a decade ago I guess.
Thanks. What do you know about the security differences? Some say pairing security of Zigbee not that great. Thanks.
Other interesting thing is Debian seems to have z-wave libraries but not zigbee ones. At least my version of Debian which is old stable. Home Assistant seems to support both.
There's actually not much of a security difference between the two these days, both protocols have gone thru improvements, both use AES-128 encryption, both use frame protection etc.
That pairing issue of ZigBee was addressed with v3.0, which uses random install codes for each device.
Other question. If you were starting now what would you do? I need to start replacing old X10 stuff. Zigbee? Z-Wave? Both? Wait for Matter to sort out?
I am kind of attracted to using Home Assistant either on my media center or on a pi.
Thanks.
I have Home Assistant on an old Intel NUC, with mostly Z-Wave switches and two IP based switches, one Kasa IP switch and one Shelly switch. The Kasa and Shelly show the divide in IoT. The Kasa is everything wrong with IoT, requiring an Internet connection to function and is slow to respond. Shelly is everything right as can be. It will work just fine locally without an Internet connection if you set it up that way, but can work cloud based if you don't have a system to control it.
I'm still on the lookout for Matter switches actually for sale, instead of projects announced and nothing else. So I still buy Z-Wave switches.