Hello everyone,
This question is often asked but I still cannot find a satisfactory answer to it. How best to build home automation using knx and z-wave with HA
I am building a house and would like to plan the home automation upfront. I’m confronted with the question of how to “best” interconnect my devices intelligently.
By best, I mean having the following five points:
- local control
- privacy first
- future proof (at least a bit)
- vendor agnostic (to a large extend)
- relatively cheap (in terms of cost of hardware)
After an extensive research, I am able to narrow down the technologies that seem to meet the above four criteria. Viz., run a cable (using knx-ip) or interconnect wirelessly (using Z-wave or Zwave-plus).
HA seem to be the best option that meets most of my above criteria, including integrating both world - knx and Zwave. But then, most information I found about the exact hardware I need to setup the knx-ip stack are currently vague to me. So my questions:
- Can someone point me to a material (or steps, or git-repo) for setting-up a test environment of a fully functional knx-ip system? Just what I need to integrate the system with HA
- Must I really buy the ETS5 software tool (it costs €1000) even though If I only want to take the advantage of the wired-network to interconnect more than 5 devices? Or how can I do away with buying the software?
Note: I Have electrical and software development background.
I hope I can get to quickly pass the knx-ip stage and start the real fun here 