Wired Bus devices instead of wifi?

Feature Requests
1

Hi there
Since 10 Years i’m running a LCN System in my house. With it’s one wire bus it is rock solid and runs like a charm. Sure, wifi and ESP-Home is handy, but i don’t like it, unless it is absolutely necessary.
Wifi standardization and functionality is from the last century, radiation could be a problem, it is made for large bandwith ( not needed in our case ) and so on. A lot of compromises to make just to avoid on wire :wink:
LCN nodes are completely resilient, because they don’t need a central instance.
What i don’t like at all, is that LCN is completely proprietary.
Does anyone share the dream to have such a rock solid and simple bus architecture with just one ( or two ) signal / bus wires connecting nodes like esp32’s in esphome ?
in an open-source freedom of choice style ?

Thanks for sharing yout thoughts
Christoph

2

You could stick with ESPHome and run everything over CAN Bus…

Sort of a roll your own. You would still need one or two devices to act as gateways.

3

cool: thanks a lot
already had a look on CAN-Bus.
Sure i’ll need gateways.
So all to do is implementing/ configuring CAN on the ESP32 nodes, switching off wifi and everything works like before ?

4

I wish. Nope you’ll have to write your own message handler using lambda.

The ESP handles CAN natively - but thats at the layer 3 level - you’ll need to handle messages and interpret them. Not really the best solution.

No one else has chimed in with any other suggestions, but there must be something out there.

5

I run all my lighting, on/off switching and some sensors over Schneider C-Bus. It has been rock solid for over 20 years (except when I mess it up). I would use this again if I were to move home.

I like it particularly because it has a flexible topology, good configuration software and it is robust. I dislike it for cost and colour handling is poor plus retrofit consideration. The big plus is that it integrates well with HA or MQTT and works standalone should automation fail. I have about 120 nodes on the 2 wire bus, and I use one bridge.

Where necessary I do use WiFi but try and steer clear of ZWave and ZigBee. C-Bus is regarded as rather ‘old’ now but there’s few competitors really. maybe KNX…