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ZigBee Pro, the New Home Automation Standard?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-if-only-they-all-worked-together dept.

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."

5 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Creating A Problem. by senorpoco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I love the idea of home automation, then I realize that my light switch isn't that far away.

    1. Re:Creating A Problem. by Eil · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I love the idea of home automation, then I realize that my light switch isn't that far away.

      I'm sure you were going for +5 Funny, but somehow you wound up at Insightful instead.

      To enlighten the mods a little: home automation is less about having to leave your couch to turn off the light than it is about giving your house the ability to control itself according to parameters that you specify.

      These days, anyone can write a program that runs on their computer. Only a few of us so far can run a program that runs on our house.

  2. I don't know about others... by toppavak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    light switches, thermostats, door locks, motorized shades, security systems, remote controls and some 36 million electric meters.

    But I'd really prefer if my locks remain off any kind of network and have my security system talk over good old-fashioned copper.

  3. lack of vision. by simp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As someone who earns his money in industrial automation it amazes me how limited these home automation firms think. They want me to buy multiple sensors each with only one I/O point on them??? They want me to buy plastic toy-like stuff that breaks if you push the contact a few thousand times? And then there is the matter of future-proofing: in 5 years time nobody will be able to read the sensors anymore that you bought because "everybody" is on the new standard. What about spare parts for existing stuff, are they expecting me to rewire the house each time they come up with a new platform? Not a chance.

    Then there is software: Windows XP, maybe with .net, was a valid choice for building the interface when the company designed it a few years ago but I expect my light switch to last at least 25 years.

    These days you can run an oil refinery with a touch of a button and keep it running for 20 years with available spare parts. And you can get data in & out of that system in any format you want. Show me the same on a scaled down version for my home and I'll start installing it...

  4. IAAZP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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