With built in siren, zigbee, z-wave and Bluetooth support; interesting features like local processing and wi-fi presence. Almond 3 sounds like a very strong contender. Coming in ‘few weeks’.
Update: based on Securifi website, the box doesn’t have z-wave or Bluetooth antennas. A USB stick is required:
Almond 3 is a smart home hub with a built-in ZigBee radio. It also supports Z-Wave and Bluetooth (coming soon) devices via an external USB dongles. It works with Nest, Philips Hue, and many more of your favorite smart devices.
If it is anything like the Almond plus I’m not excited. I have one that has been collecting dust for close to a year now. Their firmware is absolutely horrible. Can’t fix horrible firmware/software by upgrading the hardware. Just my opinion.
I still don’t understand why I would want to bind all my devices to a router… I upgrade routers separately from my Home Automation. I think that’s too much in a single box. But then again, I am a bit crazy.
The only advantage I see, is using the wi-fi as presence. Sure, some of us achieved that already, but not all routers are created equal, and some are harder to code than others. Interference is a big issue, or as the myth will have it
Zigbee and wifi both share the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum.If their firmware is up to the task, integrating the two would be a sure-fire way of avoiding co-interference.
Not the way it works. Same spectrum, but not exactly the same anything else. They can interfere with each other, but not broadcast each other’s messages. And if the Almond is broadcasting on Wi-Fi, it can still interfere with zigbee messages coming back from the end devices.
Previous generations of Almond got very high ratings as a Wi-Fi router, and generally very low ratings for home automation. This tends to confuse the Amazon rankings, for example. A lot of people used it only as a Wi-Fi router and rated it very high.
On the home automation side, lots of reports of failed promises and missed timelines.
I assume they dropped Z wave to cut costs and avoid some of the things they still don’t have working in the previous generation. I wouldn’t expect it back anytime soon.
We’ll see what actually gets delivered, when it actually gets delivered, but I wouldn’t be first in line for this one.
According to the article, Almond 3 does support Zwave.
The Almond 3 features a built-in ZigBee radio chip to interact with smart home devices, it supports Z-Wave and Bluetooth devices as well. In other words, the Almond 3 can replace the Philips Hue hub and all these other different hubs. It also integrates with Nest devices.
I backed the Almond Plus and held on to it for many months hoping the software would catch up to the hardware. It never happened. It was light years behind the other HA hubs I was using. Hopefully they will have better luck with v3.
I think you misunderstood my earlier comment. I was simply offering a possible explanation for the question asked. That is, having the two rf generators in the same box under common control would (potentially) eliminate collisions and adjacent channel interference.
Ha, TP-link just announced a smart router that has z-wave and zigbee but not Bluetooth. Interesting announcements at CES. Let’s see how they materialize.
