Thanks for posting this, I will review when I have a chance. I have recently changed jobs from traditional Enterprise IT to a major general contractor firm that builds skyscrapers, and now I work for the āSmart Buildingsā division.
Iām no RF engineer, (IP & Ethernet is my networking background), but itās very interesting to see how consumer-level home automation tech like Z-Wave & Zigbee are beginning to intersect with commercial systems and evolve. For example, @JasonJoel compared Z-Wave LR to LoRaWAN, and then there is Zigbee & IEEE 802.15.4 as communication layers for CHIP & Thread. Sometimes these evolving protocols integrate with each other, and sometimes they compete, (sometimes both), such as CHIP, Zigbee IP, Thread, and 6LoWPAN, all of which run over IEEE 802.15.4.
As an aside, @JasonJoel, are there consumer-level LoRa/LoRaWAN products available in the market? And are you integrating any such products into a consumer-level solution like Hubitat? Or are the LoRaWAN gateways too expensive to justify at the expected price point a consumer could stomach?
As with Z-Wave long range, there are a few development kits for LoRa that are almost full-fledged products. But as someone mentioned previously it is the LoRa router that is hard to set up and not very user friendly and I am an electrical engineer with 39 years of programming experience.
In my opinion, I don't think you will see a lot of commercially available LoRa products until this one aspect can be fmade more user friendly.
I sent a question in to silabs who is the maker of the Z-Wave chipsets.
The only issue with long range that I have found is that the firmware must be compiled for long range or not long range. It's not a run time switch and so a developer would have to have two versions of firmware for the same device.
Internally to the code it is actually a compile time switch.
The good news is that the hardware could be the same.
This would make a manufacturer have to decide whether long range was on their roadmap.
Just to clarify though, we can run both LR and Classic on the same hub right even though LR devices don't repeat? Or will we need a secondary hub top separate the networks?
One hub for both. EDIT: Although it is unclear to me whether that can be added "on the run" on an existing gateway or if the zwave network would have to be trashed/set default, capability turned on, then rebuilt... The docs are confusing there.
Now that v7.15.4.0 is released to the public (1st public non-pre-GA version with zwave lr), maybe that is the version we will see in a future platform update.
Also to be clear, the legal IP review isn't technically complete either (June). But I would think they are expecting that to come out OK, otherwise they wouldn't be proceeding.
Yeah. I would fully expect some manufacturers to not get super serious on manufacturing until after that is done. I'm sure they are all still working on devices/prototypes, but I expect it would be hard to justify going to mass production pre-certification.
Assuming they can even get parts TO manufacture anything, and aren't waiting on a mystery IC they can't get right now... Stupid supply chain issues.
Cool thing is.. There is no reason for manufacturers to not jump on this when the dust settles.. A LR device can be included in a classic mesh (backwards compatible)...
Define "soon". As there are no hubs that support zwave lr, there is no real need for commercial devices yet. A bit of a "chicken or the egg" situation right now.
I'm sure there are multiple companies working on, or testing, zwave lr devices though. But I would guess as unannounced products/functionality @bcopeland probably can't comment/confirm (just like he won't tell me what was in a that big box of Jasco device he got the other day). Which is super annoying.
So zwave lr will require specific zwave lr devices to achieve this, my current non zwave lr locks that have issues (unless the hub is near by) would not be solved by this addition, unless I replaced the lock itself with a zwave lr one, am I understanding this correctly?
I couldn't tell for sure. I'm an amateur, so I get confused sometimes on what can be done where between the z/ip gateway notes and the sdk notes.
A bit of a "chicken or the egg" situation right now.
