Z-Wave?

[Tom Metro]

Seth Gordon wrote:
> Is Z-Wave a worthy contender for Linux geeks looking to upgrade from X10?
> 
> (From some googling around, it seems that ZigBee doesn’t have as many
> hardware vendors signing on, and Linux support for Insteon is not very
> good.)

The answer isn't straight forward.

Z-Wave, as far as being a home automation protocol, is leaps and bounds
ahead of X10. The same may be true with Insteon. When I looked at the
home automation market a few years ago, I chose Z-Wave because it had
multi-vendor support. (Insteon was predominantly supported by one
vendor; I don't think that has changed.) Z-Wave also makes a clean break
from power-line communications, instead using an RF mesh network. While
Insteon still uses X-10 style (though improved) communications in most
of its modules (some also use RF; they pitch Insteon as if every devices
handles both RF and power-line, but most don't).

ZigBee is a cool protocol, and more open than the others (being an IEEE
standard), but there is a lack of commercial products available. Several
vendors sell ZigBee modules for embedded systems, so if you are building
your own gadget, you'll likely find it easier to get a ZigBee module to
integrate into it. (You can get a Z-Wave development kit, but it'll cost
you many hundreds to thousands.)

My goal was to eventually have a system that was controlled by Linux,
but despite the existence of commercial solutions, like MiCasaVerde,
which open sourced bits of their code, but not the Z-Wave driver, there
wasn't good support in Linux due to Z-Wave's owner keeping tight reins
on the protocol.

I haven't been following Linux support for Insteon, but as of a few ears
ago I think it was actually better than Z-Wave, because Insteon's owner
was more open with its specifications.

LinuxMCE was the first sizable open source project to provide Z-Wave
support, and there were a bunch of smaller hack projects, which where
fairly dependent on a particular Z-Wave computer interface. The LinuxMCE
 code used LinuxMCE's driver architecture, which made it harder to reuse
in other projects.

That was followed by open-zwave[1], which was the first attempt to build
a full featured interface library. I haven't checked in to see where
they are at these days, but a year ago they had working beta code.

1. http://code.google.com/p/open-zwave/

In theory, you don't need to put all your eggs in one basket. It should
be possible to control both Insteon and Z-Wave devices from a common
Linux-based controller. Helping this are technologies like xAP/xPL[2]
that provide a standard interface between home automation control
software and computer interfaces.

2. http://misterhouse.wikispaces.com/xAP+and+xPL+-+Getting+started


A couple of years since I bought my first Z-Wave devices, I still don't
have them under Linux control. (I need to take another look at the
available projects to see where they stand now.) I'm generally happy
with the quality and reliability of the hardware. It still feels like
Z-Wave adoption by hardware vendors is progressing slowly. There is a
vastly greater variety of devices available for X-10, though I don't see
that as a meaningful comparison, as in my experience X10 had such poor
reliability as to be useless.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/