Thanks

http://www.smartofthehome.com/2014/03/4-noks-zb-connection/

What is the point of the ZigBee logo/badge if you can’t trust it will work with other devices sharing the same logo. The Z-Wave logo on the other hand does carry that guarantee of compatibility.

There is no money at all to be made in generic Zigbee End Devices, and I’m not aware of any in the HA space. Instead, everybody seeks to differentiate themselves by using custom clusters and profiles. This is especially attractive to a manufacturer because a custom end device requires a custom Zigbee Controller, and there are better margins there, plus you get to up-sell whatever cloud service the whole shooting match is hooked up to, *and* you get to mandate the network security.

But unfortunately there can only be one ZC on any given network.

At best you will find ZEDs that implement a custom protocol and make some effort to support the interop clusters too (the original AlertMe security system took this approach), but if you’ve gone to the trouble of designing custom ZC, clusters, back-end service, network security etc you suddenly become a bit reticent about letting unbranded el-cheapo generic devices on to your network.

The big win with Zigbee over stuff like ZWave is the mesh capability and the packet routing over the mesh (yes, I know ZWave makes claims here), but it is weighed down by this fundamentally flawed “one controller to bind them all” networking model.

Happily, much of the good stuff in Zigbee comes from the MAC protocol which underpins it – 802.15.4. If you had a decent routing/addressing model, you could chuck the zigbee bit and just use IP on top of 802.15.4. You wouldn’t need a fancy proprietary ZC, just something that can securely bridge packets between your WPAN and the internet. Your next WLAN access point could do it.

As luck would have it, these are exactly the same problems that IPv6 has to solve, and there has been for many years an attempt to marry the two, called 6LoWPAN. Within the last year or so, this has become a serious contender, so much so that even the Zigbee Alliance can see the writing on the wall: “Zigbee IP” is basically 6LoWPAN rebadged to make it look like it was their idea all along.

I am hopeful that all the current IoT hoohah and Zigbee’s adoption of 6LowPAN will drive this tech forward; I’ve had the opportunity to develop for it and use it in anger and it is an absolute joy to use compared with Zigbee, ZWave, BLE etc. But then Betamax was way better than VHS and look what happened there 😉

The Plugwise ZigBee implementation uses a proprietory protocol layer so their network doesn’t inter operate with any other ZigBee kit, repeaters or support network analysis software. Unfortunately Plugwise don’t offer any network analysis / routing path info either, so if your network is marginal it’s hard to ascertain just where it’s struggling.

The appliance modules / circles all default to the ON state after a power cycle, a much debated behaviour online. I only found out after I deployed a Plugwise module for my immersion heater control and it had turned itself on for a week before I realised. One to be aware of safety wise with any heating type appliance / if you’re going away on hols.

Mine is an older Plugwise version which uses a PC ZigBee dongle rather than the Stretch 2 gateway. I don’t know if this behavior has changed recently.

The HomeSeer (Vera) integration has worked well for me allowing me full control and real time status reporting of Plugwise modules with the rest of my HA system.

K