That's just what they officially support. According to:
and most of those are middleware layers that can be plugged into other things. Seems like Smart Things and Hue will talk to them, for example.
Theo
Fitted some in a dance studio a few months ago.
Dimmed to zero with a varilight and all in perfect harmony.
I'll have to get work to find out what make they were.
Product details -> Read more says 600lm. 2400lm altogether is quite bright!
We'll see how longevity goes. I note Ikea have a habit of discontinuing things, which is a bit concerning.
Since it's Zigbee it may be possible to pair a third party controller, I haven't tried.
Office / spare bedroom. In office mode you might want bright / cool white (eg for photography), in bedroom mode you might want dim / warm, maybe a dim light over the bed and not over the desk, etc. At one point I'd like to try dimming based on daylight levels too.
Anything that talks to an external server is a nono for me. Zigbee is nice in that respect.
(with an exception for the catflap because there wasn't much alternative and nobody has cracked its proprietary zigbee-knockoff yet).
Theo
It's what I'm going to do. I experimented with a panel and the light is so much better.
Bill
Adam, the type you put me onto was Varilight V-Pro programmable. Worked perfectly with a LED panel.
Bill
thanks
Ah thanks, this old FF / XP was having issues resolving the pages properly.
Yeah, it's nice to have.
(For clarity, I was talking specifically of the 'supplied' puck remote here)
Agreed, especially when it's 'quickly'.
Ok.
<snip>
The zoning thing makes sense, as do the levels, if you can group multiple lamps to avoid shadows etc.
And with light, occupancy and RFID sensors on the camera, it could set it all up for you itself. ;-)
<snip>
I didn't like the idea.
I'll have to look into that closer then.
;-)
Cheers, T i m
I was expecting to have to splash out[1] for a V-Pro but do you know the make/model of the driver/panel please?
[1] I trust imitation of Yorkshire folk is surely the sincerest form of flattery :)Some apparently seem brighter, but I would suggest that the light depends on the frequencies it contains and both the old tubes and leds use some very broad ideas of what white light is, with holes in the spectrum all over the place. I remember when I was losing my sight, some lights that were supposed to be very bright white seemed to be grainy and a bit blue and hard to take, while others that looked to normal people a bit on the red side of yellow, worked well. The eye is easily fooled until things start to go wrong, which is why limumins are not a good guide. If we knew the eye condition, then we might be of more help. Brian
Sorry, no. I don't seem to have a record of it.
Bill
No specific eye condition as yet, just the usual effects of ageing such as smaller pupils and clouded lenses.
<snip>
Yorkshire man knows, flattery is cheaper than buying flowers.
Owain
I was looking at some Zigbee stuff and found this guy on Youtube:
Like, if Zigbee is the only one that allows you to run your own server (if it can etc) then for some that could be enough to make any cost or even performance differences irrelevant?
I would like the idea of the remote control, monitoring of sensors and creating a rule based on an input etc (when light level below x, turn light on etc) and storing it locally?
Is he right in that you can do the same range of things equally using Zigbee or Wifi or is he not comparing them equally?
Cheers, T i m
He doesn't know what he's talking about, and he's resistant when people try to explain things to him.
Zigbee is a *low power*, low bandwidth protocol. For instance I have a fleet of $7 temperature/pressure/humidity sensors that run off CR2032s (lifetime 1 year).
Wifi is a high bandwidth, *high power* protocol. If you have a battery powered gadget, expect to replace the battery every few days/weeks (or provide a car battery).
Wifi is fine for things which are mains powered, but rubbish for anything which is battery powered. When you need to get megabits/s of data off something, like a camera, wifi is the protocol to use. When you need bits/s of data, use Zigbee.
(There are some wifi devices that claim years battery life, but that's because they just turn themselves off until they detect something. They aren't there on the network checking in readings every minute. That's fine for eg a door sensor, but not for a temperature sensor)
Zigbee's mesh is designed so your low power sensor nodes can get connectivity via nearby mains powered devices that act as repeaters. This means they don't have to shout loudly (eating their battery) to be heard over the cacophony of wifi devices.
You can do both of those things, but for wifi you'll need a mains connection.
The other thing is that Zigbee has a standard-ish application layer protocol, so you can get data off things without needing a specific driver (when the manufacturer actually implements the spec correctly anyway).
Wifi is just a network - your widget might speak a standard application protocol (eg MQTT) but it probably speaks something proprietary.
Of course none of this bothers you when, like him, you just use the vendor's half-working app that talks to their server in China, that will break in a year or two when they get bored.
(There are also gadgets that speak Bluetooth, which have the proprietaryness problem but better battery life)
Finally, the place to get a lot of this stuff is Aliexpress or ebay - smart home tech is much bigger in China than it is here. Often we get high-cost products from heavily-marketed brands (Hive, Nest, Alexa) when the Chinese market is much more focused on lower cost products that work just as well (eg Xiaomi's Aqara brand).
Theo
After working with a group in this field the principle advantage of Zigbee is that low power is built into the protocol. So where mains or low cost power is available there is no advantage.
By example, a smart gas meter would likely use Zigbee to chat to the associated electric meter to relay consumption figures.
You can run your own WiFi server, it's just that there is a great deal more protocol overhead, by the time you have access point, some kind of IP server and a programme that understands an IP protocol and translates it both ways to communicate with the devices.
Or, if it's Amazon, it broke two days ago. Roombas and Rings all went down.
Owain
I thought as much but I thought I'd check.
Yeah, I did watch more of a dry overview of the design features but different people can have different POV on it all.
Check.
Yup, that's what I understood (and mentioned).
Noted. And they are the sorts of things I might be interested in, data acquisition (12V battery voltages) etc.
Gotcha.
K;-)
Yeah, I do like the idea of 'open' for that reaction.
;-)
Yeah, the overview I watched (but now can't find) did actually cover all that sort of thing but didn't really convey how it all worked (over a range of it) ITRW.
Like, do you have (or can you have) some sort of server or is it called / in the hub? How would you tell a mains lamp to turn on on a schedule and / or from a mechanical switch etc? (I 'get' the switches and sockets etc).
Noted.
Something to look out for thanks.
So, I'm guessing I'd be looking for it to say 'Zigbee compatible' or some such? Can devices be compliant to more than one base system?
Could you point me to a selection of the things I would need to say setup an 'occupancy light' that would come on at dusk and go off at midnight please and that I could also override remotely (within the house at least) from my phone?
Cheers, T i m
Zigbee stuff needs a 'coordinator' bridge from Zigbee to 'something else', because your phone/laptop/etc don't have Zigbee. That's typically the hub which has a network connection, but there are USB dongles (I'm using a CC2531 in a RPi).
The software on the hub gets messages like 'button pressed', 'temperature
15C' and can send messages like 'turn on light'. Then it's up to it what to do with it - call out to Alexa or some cloud server, or have the logic locally, it entirely depends on how it's programmed.(Because your phone does Bluetooth an advantage the BT gadgets have is they can be controlled directly from a phone app, but often in a limited way - eg need to be in the same room for the connection to work. BT doesn't really scale very well)
Start here. It lists a lot of devices and shows which middleware gateways they're compatible with. The better behaved ones are supported by all the gateways, although the absence of support may just mean nobody has tried it.
There are various routes but I'd suggest looking at Home Assistant on a RPi:
Then you need a Zigbee dongle, depending on the gateway software you pick. Home Assistant has its own Zigbee plugin now, which might be a good starting point and supports various:
If pairing is enabled in ZHA, you initiate pairing on the device (hold a button, turn it on/off 6 times, whatever). HA picks it up and shows a bunch of controls on your home screen, depending on whatever it does (sensor, toggle, dial, etc). You can rename them, hide the irrelevant ones, group them, etc. You can also set up rules like 'when ambient light < X do ...'. All the telemetry is logged so you get graphs of everything.
Theo
OK.
Understood.
Handy, (bookmarked) thanks.
Funnily enough I'd just got to that after posting last (but not downloaded any images as yet). It's good to have something tangible to play with to start to see how it works etc.
Ok.
Ah, I thought I'd seen reference to Home Assistant (and looked it up) previously and thought that 'it' was what was 'Zigby'. So it's just a generic platform that can take optional plugins (like Zigbee) to make it more flexible, add those features etc?
So was that the same as I would have done with the Ikea LED lamp and it's little dimmer puck? I think you pressed / held a button on the puck near the lamp (or there was a button on the lamp).
That's the exciting bit. ;-)
Cool.
Handy.
Sounds a bit like the other thing I was running on a RPI Zero W that collected info from weather stations and my mates Solar installation etc (that I can't think of the name of now). I ran it for quite a while (and it was mostly reliable) just that several of the remote sites must have shut down and I think I used the RPi for something else.
I might (try to) put HA > Zigbee on a RPi4 tomorrow ... (after I've figured out why my newish ITX / Atom based W10 PC gives an 'Out of range' on the NEC MultiSync LCD2070NX monitor as soon as the Intel Driver installs, even though it's set to just 1024x768 on both the default MS driver and the Intel one (after going into SafeMode and (supposedly) setting the res to that in the Intel driver)? ;-(
Cheers, T i m
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