Seeking zwave advice

Third party integrations
1

Hello!
I’m new to home assistant as of 10 days ago. I’m using Hass.io and so far, really loving it.
I’m starting off light and trying to limit the number of technologies used in my setup as much as possible. So far I’m only communicating over ethernet/wifi and having very good results.

I’m noticing that while there are loads of options for various devices, it looks like I may have to invest in zwave or zigbee in order to accomplish everything I want to do. So my question to all of you is, Are there any advantages to using the z-wave stick vs vera or wink? It would seem that wink has more potential connections with all of the radios in it but what about latency, compatibility, feature translation to HA from these devices?

Thank you!

2

The advantage is saving yourself about 90% of the purchase price.

After that I doubt there’s much difference tbh, functionally speaking.

3

That’s good to know. I hoped that it wasn’t a case of “you get what you pay for.”
Thanks!

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4

I think ‘what you pay for’ with the others is their interface and support and whatever other guff, but if your here you don’t need it IMO.

And then you have about £90 left for other gadgets :sunglasses:

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5

Yeah, I’ve noticed that you can save a boat load if you’re more interested in the hardware than the rest.
Prime examples have been sonoff switches and ankuoo wall switches.

What do you like for the zwave controller?

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6

I had one of the razberry gpio boards but I’ve recently upgraded from the pi so just went with their USB version…

I got it cheaper than that, that was just the first result. Works fine :+1:

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7

Zwave and Zigbee are not the only alternatives out there :P, 433mhz is very cheap compared with the rest tho’ you don’t get any feedback. It depends on how much you want to spend, there are also DIY versions which are even cheaper.

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8

I thought about using this for some custom sensors but do they make door locks using that protocol?

9

Yep I’m currently using a HomeEasy HE106X

10

I haven’t heard of HomeEasy yet. Thanks for the info!

11

Hey Andrew, I’m new to HA as well (just over a month) and yesterday I received my Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 and had an easy time setting it up. It’s plugged into my Pi. Cheap and there are lots of comments on the forum here about it… I also saw another one that supports Z-Wave and Zigbee in one stick but don’t have any experience with it since I bought the Aeotec, search for it: Linear HUSBZB-1.

Remember that if you run hassio, you should “add node” for new devices through the hassio z-wave controller, not by pulling out the usb stick and manually doing the pairing with the stick in hand next to the device, simply click the “Add Node” then take the device to the stick plugged in and then (normally depending on device) push the device’s action button.

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