ZigBee Pro, the New Home Automation Standard?

An anonymous reader writes "Echelon, Microsoft, Intel, Sun and the Electronic Industries Alliance have been trying to create a home automation standard for two decades — to no avail. Now the ZigBee Alliance, proprietor of a low-rate two-way wireless mesh networking technology, says it will prevail. In six weeks, automation vendor Control4, which has about one million ZigBee nodes installed, will flip the switch on the new ZigBee Pro, which promises interoperability among light switches, thermostats, door locks, motorized shades, security systems, remote controls and some 36 million electric meters."

Comments

Too expensive

[tkrotchko]

I like the idea of home control, lights that turn on and off, and I've been doing it with X10 for about 20 years. But I realize it has problems, poor reliability, requires neutral in the switch box for most installations, switches and outlets that actually stop functioning after 2 years, limited availability, poor selection of switch types and colors, and extremely high prices.

So Insteon comes out and solves the first problem, and nothing else. Hey, dig that light switch for $45 plus shipping! (http://www.smarthome.com/2476S/SwitchLinc-Relay-INSTEON-Remote-Control-On-Off-Switch-Non-Dimming-White/p.aspx). A standard switch costs all of $1.

And ZigBee doesn't even have interoperability on it's side? And I'm guessing we're not going to see remote switches for $1. I'd even settle for $5-10. I'm guessing the switches will cost $70. It's like they aim at the high-end of the market to get a little traction, then settle comfortably into selling $45 light switches.

It's been many years, and I guess the market isn't there, because everything we have now is overpriced and underperforming.

IAAZP

[Anonymous Coward]

I Am A Zigbee Programmer.

Some of the points being raised are a bit.. underinformed.

Interoperability: the Zigbee Cluster Library includes standard APIs for many kinds of devices, including lightswitches, HVAC, home security, etc. Devices that are certified to conform to the specification are fully interoperable. The Zigbee APIs are publicly available at zigbee.org.

Battery life: battery powered devices may last for several years if they "sleep" between transmissions. Their "parent" node in the network stores messages destined for the sleeping node. These so-called "sleepy" nodes cannot route for other nodes though, so if you have a physically large network, you'll probably want some non-sleepy devices in there running on building power. This is one of the most important features of Zigbee, and in spite of some of the other commenters here, this is actually real.

Price: this is the key reason why Zigbee will succeed: it is cheaper to retrofit a building with Zigbee devices than to knock out walls and run new wires. It's far more expensive than installing tradition switches in a new building, but that's not the a "use case." My company's clients are all looking at retrofitting HVAC systems on existing buildings and are finding some decent cost savings.

Interference: Zigbee does use the 2.4 GHz band as a lot of other devices, but there are various mechanisms (link-level acks and retries, and some other things I don't understand) built into Zigbee to mitigate this. In our tests, interference has not been an issue. Metal objects such as doors and filing cabinets have been a much bigger problem in our tests.

- Dave