ST Alternative?

I wish I could help you. I tried my hand at basic ST security back in Oct of last year. That nightmare lasted about a week.

I’ve been monitoring the sector reads and honestly, I recommend a professional security company.

St just needs to mature to too much for trust worthy security.

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Can you please point out what my (limited) options are, technical skill aside?

I am a technical person, not a coder by profession, but I can read / understand code and I could even get my hands dirty (especially if it is a scripting language) if the result was worth it. My minimum security setup is dead simple, as I have described in my post above:

“If any of the Zigbee multi sensors returns OPEN then sound both z-wave sirens.”

It’s not so much about code.

You need a hardware piece that can process zigbee commands from your sensors and then another hardware piece that can send zwave commands to your sirens. And a processor that can handle rule setting for both. That’s what the SmartThings system does, but because it depends so much on the cloud, there’s a lot of instability.

If you look at the list of alternatives towards the top of this thread, you’ll see that most of them don’t handle Zigbee.

Indigo for example is very stable, runs locally, but only does zwave and Insteon.

zipato can run locally but costs a lot more – – it would probably be cheaper to just replace your zigbee sensors with zwave one’s and run indigo.

OpenHAB can also run locally but again, doesn’t have zigbee support for your sensors.

Staples runs locally and is very solid, but isn’t available in UK Zwave and doesn’t work with your particular zigbee sensors. So it’s not a good solution for your case. Same with piper.

Vera plus may eventually offer what you want, but the model that handles Zigbee was just released and it has a lot of bugs right now. My guess is it’ll be six months before it’s really stable.

Since you’re in Greece, if you were starting from scratch I would probably recommend indigo and an all zwave system for the use case you’ve described. But the problem is preserving your existing investment in the smartthings zigbee sensors. I guess my second recommendation would be to wait a few months and see if vera plus or ST stabilizes. I don’t know if @johnr has any thoughts to add.

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Thanks a lot @JDRoberts. I have seen Zipato and it is smth i consider. Also Vera Plus. I will drop a comment at their forum.

Any more suggestions are more than welcome.

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Slightly off topic but has anyone used or heard of Stringify (https://www.stringify.com/the-app/) ? It looks like IFTTT on steroids. From what I can see, it can link all kinds of iOT together but I’m not sure that it can actually replace native code. It’s IOS only for now, Android coming soon.

Stringify, like the similar Yomomi, is an IFTTT-like rules engine supporting more complex rules with a better UI. But it can’t substitute for SmartThings because it doesn’t have any physical device controllers. So it would be an add on to SmartThings, not an alternative.

They have an existing thread in the forums:

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Neither protocol can communicate directly between devices. For example my door contact sensor does not tell my alarm to sound when the door opens. All communications have to pass though the hub, and possibly the internet (well most likely). Perhaps there are cases where that is not true, but for the majority it is.

The mesh network is a fair argument, but doesn’t matter unless powered. If you have a couple of zwave/zigbee powered devices then those can be separate meshes.

Absolutely not. Z-Wave in particular is designed to allow direct association between devices and does not require a hub at all.

In specific situations, not enough to stay tied to a single protocol. I don’t think any devices on Smartthings leverage direct communications.

I currently have a mix of zwave and zigbee devices, no issues. Both protocols have pros and cons, but in the end are fairly close.

edit: spelling

The protocol itself allows direct communication between devices. SmartThings hub is just another “controller” as far as any Z-Wave device is concerned. And not a very good one at that. You can use a dinky $25 MiniMote to create direct associations. Something that $99 ST hub with 800 MHz 32-bit processor is unfortunately unable to do.

Zwave requires a controller to establish the network. You can then set up direct association between two devices on that network if both support association. But they have to be within one hop of each other and the hub may not know the status of the devices.

Zigbee requires a coordinator for most profiles, but not for ZLL. For other profiles, you can bind two devices together pretty much the same way as you can with zwave association. Like the Philips dimmer switch and its bulbs. :bulb: :bulb: :bulb:

Zigbee has a shorter range per hop, but a device can be up to 15 hops away from the hub. Zwave plus has a range that is longer per hop, but a device can only be max 4 hops from the hub. zigbee has better power management, but can get drowned out by wifi, making it tricky in some buildings for fixed location devices like locks.

Zwave is limited to 232 devices per network, Zigbee can go much higher.

So pluses and minuses to both.

I generally prefer Zigbee for battery-operated sensors, but I liked having the option of a zwave lock. :sunglasses:

Different things will work for different people.

This is highly arguable. Most modern battery-powered Z-Wave devices use FLiRS technology (a.k.a. beaming) which is very power efficient. Sure, if you compare recent Zigbee devices with 5-year old ZWave devices that don’t support beaming, that may be true, but with FLiRS, I believe ZWave is more power efficient than Zigbee.

No question, we won’t know for sure until Zwave plus devices have been out in the field for a while. They’re promising 50% better battery life for zwave plus over previous generations, and if they accomplished that it will be a big improvement, obviously. We’ll see. They’re both low-power protocols, certainly. :sunglasses:

By the way, in the previous discussions about signal passing through water, we just discussed frequencies. I asked an academic friend about this because it’s just always been a truism among the field engineers that I know, and he said it’s the use of DSSS (Zigbee) versus FSK (Zwave). Zigbee is a more robust modulation for this reason. So at least I wasn’t completely crazy. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
( @bamarayne )

There’s no doubt about that. Zigbee is implemented on top of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer, which is far more advanced than Z-Wave MAC (ITU G.9959). And that’s the reason why until recently Zigbee radios were more expensive than ZWave. :sunglasses:

P.S. BTW, the article you have referenced has too many technical inaccuracies, for example:

the number of nodes supported with a Z-Wave product is 232 theoretically and 10 practically. However, the same figures in case of a single ZigBee network goes up to 65,000 and 50, respectively.

I really don’t know what the author was smoking. 10 Z-Wave nodes?! Even 10-years old, 1-st generation handheld Z-Wave controllers supported at least 32 nodes. Modern controllers support maximum theoretical limit of 232 nodes. And as far as Zigbee is concerned the HA profile has a limit of 500 nodes, not 65,000 as stated in the article.

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Yeah, it’s not a great article, it was the first one I found that mentioned FSK instead of GFSK. I’ll remove it, it doesn’t change the point about DSSS anyway. :sunglasses:

I just ordered smartthings, should have it today, but beginning to wonder if I made a mistake. Started out with a wemo switch because only wanted automated outside lights at that point. Its been very dependable but lack of dimming is getting old and want to add some more automation. I have an echo so good to see that connects to ST but at this point in time I think the whole home automation thing is still a hobby for people who enjoy messing around with things and I include myself in that list but normal peopke, like my wife, just want something that works. Even if the initial setup requires some tech skill it needs to be more dependable once up and running. It would be nice if one day it’s as dependable as your homes electrical or plumbing systems-you flick a switch and a light comes on it you open a faucet and water comes out…

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The zigbee vs zwave is like coke vs pepsi argument. The 65,000 is the theoretical limit in address allocation. Why that is important? See IPv4. zWaves limit of 232 is probably good enough now, but in 10 years will it be?

As for ST and most competitors, they are around $100 and works most the time. People want perfection, don’t see it happening at this price point. At least ST been around for a few years, get regular updates, and have powerful custom device handlers/smart apps. With Samsung behind them, hopefully they won’t fold like Wink. I think in the next 2-3 years we will have a good solution(might not be ST). Luckily zwave and zigbee are both common standards and useable by most systems.

10 posts were split to a new topic: Keeping Existing Switches? (micro relays)

Just read this and found it interesting. I am somewhat familiar with OpenHub, but not at all with the other four mentioned. Did anyone work with any of these other four?

OpenHAB has been discussed a lot in the forums (and in the list above).

A couple of the others are basically rules engines and UIs, not device controllers. (A hint is if it says it’s compatible with Vera.) you’d still have to add device controllers to them before you could substitute for SmartThings functionality. Home Assistant is one of these.

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