Zigbee? Future of home automation?

[kevin1]

Doing a lot of reading on home automation lately and I am surprised to see that Z-wave is the protocol that HG is supporting.  It seems like Zigbee is more open.  For example there are Zigbee shields for Arduino, but no Z-wave that I can find.  SmartThings is using Zigbee. 

I  bought the GE Wink hub which supports both because of a deal at local HomeDepot store (buy 2 compatible products get the Wink hub for $1... but then I found out the compatible bulbs also need there own gateway (yet another protocol), and another $66.  I am planning to take Wink hub back and wait for for the "protocol wars" to settle out.  So I dug my old X10 gear out of the basement and found HG to get me by so I don't waste money on the losing protocol.

in HG, why is Z-wave being used and  not Zigbee?  Is Zigbee support being added?  Are there still multiple Zigbee variations that cause difficulties?  I haven't been able to determine that but my impression is that Z-wave is less open and more expensive to to licensing.

Anyway... just wondering what the future will be in Home Automation with so many devices/hubs popping up past year (Lowes Iris, Staples Connect, SmartThings, GE Wink, etc).

Thanks!
Kevin

[bkenobi]

HG is an open source project that allows contributions.  Gene has a post that suggests ways to help, but the highlights are:

• write the interface yourself and submit to github
• find the source somewhere else and modify it to fit in
• donate hardware to the project so the author can build the interface when he gets a chance
• make a financial donation to the project to help offset some of the author's voluntary time he spends away from friends/family to work on the project

I would suggest trying 1 and 2 if you are a programmer.  If not, you could try 3 or 4.  If none really suite you, you can simply add a feature request and hope it sparks consideration.

[kevin1]

Sorry, I wasn't meaning to be critical, just trying to understand where things are heading before I invest money.

[bkenobi]

np, just making a suggestion if you were looking to go Zigbee for sure.  I haven't looked at RF protocols very much since I'm concerned about range.

[dutchie]

Doing a lot of reading on home automation lately and I am surprised to see that Z-wave is the protocol that HG is supporting.  It seems like Zigbee is more open.  For example there are Zigbee shields for Arduino, but no Z-wave that I can find.  SmartThings is using Zigbee. 

Anyway... just wondering what the future will be in Home Automation with so many devices/hubs popping up past year (Lowes Iris, Staples Connect, SmartThings, GE Wink, etc).

Thanks!
Kevin

Where did you find that zigbee is more open?
As far as I know most devices are "propietary branded" and only a handfull with HA-standard, besides in europe zigbee devices are quite expensive.
(zigbeee is a nice protocol though)

I think zigbee is more popular in the US and Asia.

[kevin1]

By open I meant ZigBee was more "open to hobby electronics" with Arduino.  Mainly, there aren't any z-wave interfaces/shields/etc for Arduino.  They do exist for Zigbee (Xbee).  So maybe it isn't really more open in the general sense, it just hasn't made its way into Arduino (which is surprising to me since there seems to be a lot more z-wave products).

From what I understand the z-wave chipset requires a $3000 dev kit / license... surprising someone hasn't payed that and made a shield.