10 Reasons for ripping out a £6k lighting system #Zwave #WiFi #IoT #InternetOfThings
Rob Dobson, a career wireless person, chronicles automating a new home in 2012:
…my wife and I started a house renovation project in Edinburgh (Scotland) having moved to that great city the previous year. In our previous London abode we’d installed a wireless lighting system from a company called Rako and it worked well enough to convince us that wireless was the way to go. Now, having installed and maintained a system with over 150 wireless lighting control circuits over the past 7 years I’ve finally had to admit that my technology choice was wrong. The Z-Wave wireless lighting system I installed just doesn’t work for a home like mine. I have now ripped out almost all of the Z-Wave units I installed – which had cost me more than £6k to buy and install.
For the home configuration, Z-Wave was just unworkable. Why? 10 reasons:
Z-Wave Pairing
Z-Wave Healing After Adding a Module
Scale
Resilience and Backup
Failure Concentration and Complexity
Failure Rate
Dead-Nodes
Handling Power-Failures
Poor Diagnostic Tools
The Cost
The new lighting system is WiFi based and costs a fraction of the Z-Wave system.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 9.2.1, What is DMA, PyConUS 2025 and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
