Amazon acquires Blink: do they just want the camera, or the new security system?

[JDRoberts]

@RBoy

It also claims that ZigBee has a higher battery drain and it’s to do with the operating frequency.

Zigbee has better power management then Z wave, which is why zigbee devices are typically smaller with better battery life.

I believe you are referring to the following sentence from the article, which. can be confusing because it’s poorly written.

The two technologies could be a natural fit, with Z-Wave sending radio signals over the 908 MHz spectrum in the United States, while ZigBee shares the same 2.4 GHz frequency band as Wi-Fi, which typically eats through too much power for applications like wireless sensors installed in factories or commercial warehouses.

But what that sentence means is that WiFi typically eats too much power for wireless sensors, not that Zigbee does. Zigbee was in fact designed for wireless sensors. The SmartThings brand sensors are zigbee, not zwave.

There is already an active discussion topic on the Sigma acquisition, I suggest we continue any following conversation there and leave this thread for the blink discussion.

Silicon Labs (chipmaker) acquires Sigma Designs (Zwave)

One of the reasons that Z wave devices have generally had good interoperability is that the technology was owned by a single company, Sigma designs, then other manufacturers bought their chips to include in their own devices. Although they sometimes describe themselves as an open standard, that’s debatable. They’re a proprietary standard with an open API. Anyway…people who use Z wave devices, including most SmartThings customers, tend to think that Zwave is the dominant home automation technology. It’s not. But because it doesn’t run into Wi-Fi interference, it has tended to be the dominant off-the-shelf home automation technology for low cost do it yourself projects. But that has changed over the last two years, with more and more Zigbee, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices available. The re…