Z-Wave Controller for Outside

Hardware Home Automation
3

I was unaware that there were some devices that didn’t work with certain controllers. I thought the standard was a little better defined than that. What specifically did you read that says it won’t work so I and others know what to look for before we buy?

  1. Not really. A lot of people come to openHAB because of poor performance, flakiness, and other problems with both. Hopefully someone with more experience can chime in.

  2. Zwave as a standard has the following limitations. Each device must have no more than four hops between it and the controller. Zwave sets up a mesh network (i.e. each device communicates and relays messages through its neighbors) so just because a device is not in range of your controller directly (40 feet in ideal conditions I think) so long as it is within range of a couple of other Zwave devices that are in range of some other zwave devices that are in range of the controller, theoretically they should be able to talk. One caveat to this is that battery devices don’t relay messages so these hops must be mains powered devices.

One way to extend the range of your Zwave network to your outside devices would be to install a mains powered device somewhere between and within range of both the controller and the nearest mains powered outside device. Then all of your outside devices have to be within range of this mains powered outside device.

Of course radio propagation is weird and subject to interference so this is not guaranteed to work in your specific environment. Also, in my experience, having a single mains powered device be the “gateway” hop node to the controller resulted in a somewhat brittle network. YMMV.

  1. I don’t think OH supports more than one controller at a time unless chris has made some updates to OH 2. However, all is not lost. You can install a second instance of OH and locate it closer to your outdoors network (e.g. Raspberry Pi) and connect the two OH instances together using the MQTT binding configured for EventBus. Essentially what you are doing is setting up a proxy Item on your “main” OH instance to represent the remote zwave devices. These proxy Items get updated and are bound to MQTT. Your daughter OH instance has “real” Items (use different names from the proxies or you will end up in a loop) which control the actual zwave devices.

You could also use the HTTP binding or http actions to update the states back and forth between the main and daughter OH instances.