I installed Z-Wave all over my house. Replaced all the switches, got the sensors, light bulbs where necessary, everything was Z-Wave... and it was a nightmare.<p>I ended up selling the house with everything Z-Wave still in it, and the new owners were happy to have a "Smart Home" capable home, but I will never again touch Z-Wave.<p>Once your Z-Wave network grows past a certain number of devices it becomes too chatty and devices will be unable to communicate data. That led to motion sensors being incredibly slow and or not triggering when needed. Light bulbs wouldn't change colors until seconds or sometimes minutes later when the network was freed up enough to send the commands.<p>These days I have three systems: Zigbee (through Ikea TRADFRI and Philips Hue), Lutron (Caseta wireless), and Thread (through HomeKit).<p>I have a bunch of sensors on both Zigbee and Thread and they fire in HomeKit and HomeKit takes actions to turn on/off lights as necessary.<p>Lights turn on/off almost instantly, motion sensors just work (the Thread ones especially are incredibly fast), I've got temperature sensors/lightbulbs on Thread as well.<p>I am looking forward to seeing what Matter/Thread bring next as that is definitely where I will be concentrating my purchases. Z-Wave had a chance, and unfortunately it did not seem architected/high bandwidth enough for the amount of devices I ended up having on my Z-Wave network (~200 devices)...
I see a lot of confusion in the thread regarding IoT, and to clear up some of that, IoT operates across multiple different layers of the OSI model: PHY, Network, Application. PHY is how data is modulated (think radios, etc), Network is how data is shared / routed (think WiFi), Application is the contents of the data across the network (ie, Light: Off)<p>IEEE 802.15.4 - a PHY standard, equivalent to 802.11 standards that WiFi is built on top of.<p>Z-Wave - a recently acquired technology that vertically slices the entire OSI model, defining PHY interaction, network communication, and application. SiLabs recently acquired it, but it has always only offered chips from a single company.<p>Zigbee - multiple versions of several standards: the most popular used the 802.15.4 standard for the PHY, but used custom networking and custom application layers.<p>Thread - a 6LoWPan mesh network protocol, built on top of 802.15.4. It provides the Networking layer, but does not define application layers. Allows for IPv6 traffic. It also defines some security and BLE interop. Lots of companies make Thread chips and offer their own Thread stacks<p>Matter - an Application layer standard that defines the shape and behavior of messages sent across a variety of different networking technologies: Thread, WiFi, etc. Requires IPv6, and potentially border routers to translate the PHY differences.
The title is confusing and sounds like just PR. I thought they mean "Z-Wave project is Open Source now" but looks like source code is still in private github repository and you need to be a "member" to get access.<p>What "Source Code Project" supposed to even mean? Any source code is part of some project(s).
Now that Matter and Thread are finally starting to roll out, is there really any good reason for new products to still use Z-Wave? Or am I just crazy to see this as Z-Wave trying to continue a format war (first started with Zigbee) that they're almost certainly going to lose?
Everybody here keeps talking about how reliable Z-Wave is, and I absolutely HATE mine, and was telling someone last week that I would never recommend them to anyone. Have I just had a bad experience? I have 3 Z-wave switches, and once a month at least one of them needs to be reset. They just stop responding until the air gap switch is pulled. I hate them and I can't rely on them at all.<p>Conversely, I have 30+ Zigbee switches, and they are quite reliable.<p>The only reason that I have the 3 Z-wave switches is that I needed paddle switch fan controllers with an almond color, and I could only find them in Z-wave by Enbrighten. (Side note: why are almost ALL the smart switches only available in white?)<p>Of course, as I type this, my RPi with HomeAssistant got bricked with the latest update, so now my SmartHouse is not merely dumb, it's stubborn!
One thing i have read but not seen brought up here yet is that zwave has so far only have one hardware soc vendor (silicon labs). This would seem like how they have been able to enforce certification compliance. And it’s probably leads to higher cost (hardware and software?) and thus lower adoption.<p>This open source project reportedly will start allowing more chip vendor as well, so it will be interesting how that affects the ecosystem.