A look at the ESP8266 for IoT

Posted Jun 17, 2020 0:50 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: A look at the ESP8266 for IoT by gerdesj
Parent article: A look at the ESP8266 for IoT

ZWave and ZigBee has a great advantage - they are designed to degrade gracefully. It's possible to connect switches directly to actuators (using associations) that will stay working even without the hub and in some cases even without mains power. ZWave also supports secondary hubs for redundancy.

There's also the problem with WiFi unreliability (at 2.4GHz), power use and attack surface. ZigBee/ZWave are not accessible from most devices, so a random malware on a Windows laptop can't connect to the smart lock and get all the codes from it.

A look at the ESP8266 for IoT

Posted Jun 18, 2020 8:56 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> ZWave and ZigBee has a great advantage - they are designed to degrade gracefully. It's possible to connect switches directly to actuators (using associations) that will stay working even without the hub and in some cases even without mains power. ZWave also supports secondary hubs for redundancy.

Shouldn't it be possible to do some fancy stuff with 802.11s?

A look at the ESP8266 for IoT

Posted Jun 18, 2020 9:08 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Shouldn't it be possible to do some fancy stuff with 802.11s?
No, not really. ZigBee/ZWave are supremely optimized for sensor networks and complex topologies. For that matter, newer IoT mesh products are re-using the transport layer from ZigBee.

And of course, WiFi also doesn't define protocols between devices.