I’ve been dabbling with OH2 and OH3 for a while, doing a few simple things with two WiFi smart plugs, plus kit I already had like Ecobee and Chromecast. Now looking to “level up” a bit and add some more devices (like an in-wall switch, door sensors, temp sensor). I thought Zigbee was the way to go, so I got a Conbee II USB dongle.
Not sure which option is easier to implement as I guess it depends always on personal circumstances.
I though opted for zigbee as I got a wide choice of devices, low powered, and as you said, it does not clutter up WiFi (even though both use 2.4Ghz). I like this separation.
Using now a zzah stick (running on separate LXC with MQTT and Zigbee2MQTT) with a network of 20+ devices from IKEA, Xiaomi, Tuya, own-developed ESPs.
Imho trading one 2.4Ghz device for another one makes no sense.
Even though it’s not wifi, it’ll still interfere with your 2.4Ghz wifi devices.
If you want something more energy efficient for battery devices there is still z-wave (800MHz).
But that’s another steep learning curve and with some devices it’s possible to have a sub-par experience if you don’t configure them properly. And they are expensive!
With all due respect to the author of that article (which I just read) I disagree with him. His point is “use Alexa or Google Assistant” compatible devices and everything will work. Three problems there:
Everything will work until the companies involved decide they don’t want it to anymore, like Works with Nest, or shutting down a competing brand.
You can’t do non-trivial automation, which you can with hubs like OpenHab or Home Assistant, for example make my lights blink between 7:00-8:00 when the weather forecast says it is gong to rain
Privacy? Big brother is listening, and looking forward to shove ads in your face about everything you talk about.
He claims everyone wants to control their smart home by voice. Funny, I don’t. If a person’s reason for smart home is to avoid walking to press a switch to turn on/off a light, okay… I think automation to do smart stuff, decide actions based on rules, is what it is truly about.
He also complains that hub companies are dying. Might be true. Open Source solutions like OpenHAB aren’t dying. Neither is hardware like Raspberry Pi. And they enable you to centralize views and automation.
I fully agree that you need to watch the costs! ZWave devices are too expensive, agree there, I have only a few because of that. Disappointing costs in fact. Would have a lot more if they weren’t so costly. Not sure about Zigbee’s costs.
Is Wifi fine? Yeah, I think it is in the most part. Is Zwave or Zigbee better? Yes, because of the mesh and lower traffic, but unless you have so many devices I suppose they won’t be deal breakers.
Agreed, I think another point in line with your reasoning:
Using only GA/Alexa devices: you got no/limited choice of how to use your devices, everything goes through Google/Amazon
Using OH or HA: you actually got a choice using rules locally and (if you want) still use GA/Alexa voice
In addition, you are independent, as you said, from vendors by running your own “network” and, say if Google decides to end their support, your home automation will still work via OH and any open zigbee/zwave standard (i.e. zigbee2mqtt, zigbee binding in OH etc.).
Not really.
And I will never understand those people to pick devices because of a 1-digit difference in price, ignoring all the cons.
Have you ever run a Wi-Fi device on battery ? See … and he does not even mention the word ‘battery’.
That’s not a ‘proper smart home’, that’s just unprofessional.
That article is a refutation to another article saying you should be using a hub. And if all you care about is control instead of automation then his arguments make sense. But Alexa and Google Assistant do not provide good enough ability to write “rules” and routines for anything by the most simple of scenarios. I believe you will find that author’s opinion is in the minority, especially around here. Keep in mind that his main argument was you don’t need openHAB, not that you don’t need Zigbee or Zwave. In fact he admits that he is still using at least Zigbee because he’s still forced to use Tradfre and Hue hubs which both work on Zigbee. And Alexa I believe supports Zigbee too with the larger Alexa speakers.
OH has both a Zigbee and Zwave binding. Though I don’t know if that particular coordinator works works with the Zigbee binding.
I think that article is mainly interesting in that it presents a contrarian opinion but on a close examination it is not convincing and contains a few logical fallacies. I would not make any decisions based on this or any other articles. Look at your requirements and what you want out of a home automation system and build to suit. You may be able to get away without hubs in which case you wouldn’t be using openHAB. Or you may require hubs because you require complex interactions between devices using different technologies, in which case a hub is the only way to achieve this.
The great thing about OH though is you can do both. You can use Zigbee and WiFi devices at the same time.
This is a great summary. There is no well crafted definition for home automation, but what he describes is control, not automation. If you want automation (e.g. you don’t need to issue a voice command because the lights just know to come on on their own) you need a hub, at least for now. And even when Alexa/Google Assistant/HomeKit gets smart enough to do really complex automations, you’ve not gotten rid of the hub, you’ve replaced it with Alexa/Google Assistant/HomeKit.
Over all the entire paper is basically saying “I don’t have a need for a hub so no one should have a need for a hub.” So I wouldn’t take it too seriously except to consider if you are like the author and perhaps do care about voice commands above all else in which case you can achieve your goals without a hub. I’d be OK with the article if it wasn’t so black and white but the even the title does not leave room for an alternative conclusion.
I agree that it’s mostly about how you define home automation, since voice control is marketed to non-enthusiasts as equivalent to automation. It’s also fair to say that Google Assistant and Alexa can do a lot more now than they could a few years ago, and that’s enough to keep most people happy. I think that’s the distinction the author should have made, but Internet journalism favours bold statements and hot takes that get people to react in the comments. If you write something that’s carefully considered and reasonable, no one notices and you don’t get the all-important clicks that generate revenue.
As for devices, people should just do what makes the most sense for themselves, which means evaluating an ever-changing combination of factors: budget, availability, purpose, features, AC/DC, range, ease of implementation, etc. The one thing that everyone should care about is reliability. If you can’t trust it to work, then there’s no point to it.
If I were starting over again then I might use Z-Wave wherever possible, but that would more than double my costs (versus WiFi devices) without any noticeable real-world advantages. The bigger budget might not matter to some people, but it does to me.
It’s also not as simple as choosing WiFi devices, but choosing WiFi devices that are supported. When I first installed openHAB, it immediately found the TP-Link Kasas I already had installed throughout my house. That eureka moment was really satisfying and gave me the confidence to keep going. If you had instead told me that I’d need to put Tasmota firmware on my Tuya WiFi devices and then connect to them via MQTT, I might not be here right now.
All this is to say that I’m cautiously optimistic about Matter. I feel like we’re still in the “every cable has a different port/plug” phase (parallel, serial, PS/2, FireWire, VGA) of home automation, and Matter could be the equivalent of USB. Just keep in mind how long it took for us to get from USB-A to USB-C, and that the ways in which manufacturers have implemented USB-C is far from perfect.
Haven’t read article but automation is not something my alexa can do. It does some cool stuff, but true automation only comes with a rich programming environment. I want my lights to come on when I walk in the room, but I also want them to come on at different brightness depending on the time of day… and not if it is daylight and the drapes are open… and… and
Alexa can’t do that
you get it
And at some level, aren’t Zigbee and Zwave a bit more secure if only because legions of hackers are not trying to find ways onto them. You might hack my zwave, but only if you’re a neighbor or sitting outside. Conceptually anything wifi can be seen from anywhere. But yes, Zwave is annoyingly expensive.
When I first started with OpenHAB, the majority of my devices were Wi-Fi devices. However, many of my devices don’t like it if my ISP goes down. Even if my local wireless is functioning correctly, the devices will go into a “oops, I don’t see the Internet, so I’ll let you control me by creating my own Access Point” mode – losing connectivity to the controller.
Family members can no longer control the devices. For example, they can’t turn off lights.
I try to have some type of local control for as many items as possible. If the (outside) Internet goes down or if the web-based service is offline (Google, Wink, Alexa, etc.), I still want control of as many devices as possible.
I like having a local controller (OpenHAB on a Raspberry Pi, in my case) perform the automation AND have cloud-based voice activation (such as Google Home, Alexa, etc.). I can control which devices (and which features) are sent to the cloud. I maintain local control (I can control the devices via OpenHAB even without external Internet).
What caught my attention in the article was that the author simply traded one “hub” (in the home) for another (cloud-based). He didn’t stop using a hub, he just moved the management to the cloud.
I’m not personally concerned about my ISP being down, but I live in an area where service is extremely reliable. When it’s not working, it’s usually because of something I’ve done. Or it’s a power outage, in which case nothing works anyway.
The reality is that cloud-based WiFi devices have promoted the growth of home automation by making it easy for amateurs to get started. With increased consumer interest and competition among vendors, there’s a broader range of devices available for everyone (which also pushes Z-Wave/ZigBee manufacturers to be better). Whether we like clouds or not, we’re benefiting a lot from them.
In my case, I just don’t trust solutions based in WiFi, as I don’t know at what home are they going to report my Internet traffic.
The other day I was talking to the technical support of a Chinese video door station manufacturer and he showed me a front page where I could make a recording of all the network traffic in wireshark format.
So my conclusion is that every ip device you put in your house is prone to scan your network traffic, and in that case, the less the better.
I agree with Berolas. I simply don’t use wifi based devices because I don’t trust them on my wifi.
I know I could setup a separate vlan for the wifi devices, but that would have been more complex than a simple zigbee dongle.
Probably worth pointing out to those that are new to all of this that WiFi devices could be split into two groups:
The easy plug and play devices, already configured, and probably phoning home from your network. This is what most people have.
The not-so-easy (depending on your skillset/time requirements) modified/DIY WiFi devices, based usually around the esp8266 chip and flashed with some open source firmware such as Tasmota or ESPHome. These won’t phone home.
The second group could be further split into two:
Off the shelf devices which use an esp8266 (or equivalent), and can be flashed (such as Sonoff devices).
Proper DIY, based around a nodeMCU or even a bare bones esp8266.
So it is certainly possible to have WiFi devices that don’t phone home as part of your home automation setup, though it usually requires some extra work.
Note that, whilst the Zigbee protocol itself won’t reach outside your network, your Zigbee hub might depending on your setup.
That’s easily solvable with even a basic firewall. You can block any device from communicating outside your LAN or you can monitor what addresses the devices are communicating with or attempting to communicate with.
I’m not sure the conclusion flows from the evidence. Just because some page can run wireshark doesn’t mean many or any IOT device is doing the same. I’m not saying that it has never happened but it would be kind of a stupid thing for them to do. First of all, in order to scan all your network traffic they would have to go into promiscuous mode which sticks out like giraffe in a pack of corgis. Any first year security engineering college student is going to see that and of course it will be reported far and wide and that company will likely go out of business. Secondly there isn’t a whole lot of value in sniffing your network traffic unless you are being specifically targeted instead of just a target of opportunity. Unless you are foolish, all your interaction with sensitive web sites (banks, email, etc.) is done over HTTPS which is encrypted end to end. Even if I sniff the traffic I can’t see the contents of that traffic.
The real danger posed by these devices are hidden back doors and vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit on devices exposed to the internet. And when they become compromised, the hackers, as of this writing, are not going to be sniffing your network traffic. They will make your camera start mining cryptocurrency, join it to a bot herd for DDOS attacks, or use it as a jumping off point for crypto extortion.
I’m not saying that any specific WiFi IOT device is safe or not safe. But what I am saying is that an assessment needs to be made on a case by case basis. And if you are concerned, there are mitigations that can be put in place. But any blanket “don’t use WiFi devices” comes at a significant cost in both money, time, and opportunity loss. For most people and most devices, those costs are higher than the risks which are being addressed and that makes for very poor security policy.
If people were really and truly concerned about local network security, then they wouldn’t use any WiFi devices. No access points, no smartphones, no tablets, and no computers that aren’t connected to a router by an Ethernet cable. That’s the classic trade-off between security and convenience. As @rlkoshak noted, it’s a matter of assessing personal risk.
Really, if a bad actor just wants to get on a WiFi, all they need to do is find a dense cluster (e.g. an apartment building) and then try connecting to various WiFis. They’ll probably find someone who hasn’t bothered changing the default password on a ten-year-old router.
I’d feel different if a person has reason to believe that they’re being specifically targeted. That’s part of the risk assessment.
From my perspective, Internet security is a much bigger concern than WiFi security. And again, bad actors are either looking for specific targets (e.g. businesses they can hold hostage) or low-hanging fruit (e.g. anyone who clicks a link in a phishing email, anyone who uses the same password for everything).
There are also some off-the-shelf WiFi devices that are controlled locally by openHAB, in which case you just have to have a router that can deny Internet access to specific MAC or IP addresses.
I have been looking at this issue as well to automate my house and so far am preferring ZigBee for Openhab using zigbee to mqtt with local dongle. The main reason for this was that I was having trouble working out which WiFi device will and will not work with Openhab. There seems to be 100s of devices for sale, most of them re-brands of other devices which makes it difficult to check whether a Openhab binding exists for that device or the need to flash devices. Most ZigBee devices seem to be better documented and work out of the box with no flashing (most likely due to the fact that there are less devices).
Lastly the one thing that ZigBee devices seem to do better the WiFi based devices is that ZigBee seems to support small battery powered devices that last months with no battery change. (happy to be challenged on that)
Having said all that I do use both Wifi and ZigBee with my OH installation for different devices and am happy with both.
Or it’s a power outage, in which case nothing works anyway.