Home Automation That Won’t Bug Out

Networking electronic devices for personal projects or home automation very rarely involves any wiring these days. A number of excellent wireless protocols have appeared that offer fast, reliable, and secure communication, so why bother running cables and being tethered to one location anymore? With so many low-cost development boards and consumer electronics coming equipped with one or more options for wireless connectivity by default, it just makes sense to cut the cord.

That decision is easy, but what protocol should you choose for your applications? Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, nRF24, 433MHz, LoRa, ESP-NOW — which is the best? This decision is not quite so easy, as the best option involves matching the characteristics of each protocol with the requirements of a given application. YouTuber GreatScott! has been evaluating many protocols, including those listed above, to help us all understand which we should select, and when.

In a video that was just released, GreatScott! explored another, lesser-known option that perhaps should be more widely used — Zigbee. If you have heard of this protocol but have no idea what it really is or when you might want to use it, you are not alone. Despite its many beneficial characteristics, it is not very widely used today.

GreatScott! wanted to do a practical evaluation of the technology, so he picked up some Zigbee-capable smart buttons, a temperature and humidity sensor, and an RGBW LED light bulb. The goal was to integrate them with his existing Home Assistant network, then assess their performance.

For starters, it was found that the setup was a bit more complex than, for example, a Wi-Fi device. Zigbee cannot connect to a standard Wi-Fi router, so you will need a dongle that acts as a sort of coordinator, which other devices communicate through. But once that was in place, the Zigbee devices were instantly recognized by Home Assistant and ready for use.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to using Zigbee is that everything is managed completely locally. Wi-Fi smart devices, on the other hand, generally connect to the manufacturer’s cloud computing system, sending and receiving data from this remote system for operation. That means that if your internet connection goes down, or if the manufacturer stops supporting the device, you are out of luck. No so with Zigbee.

Hardware hackers can also get in on the game. Zigbee support is present in a couple ESP32 development boards — namely the ESP32-C6 and the ESP32-H2. These boards can act both as the coordinator and the end devices, allowing hobbyists to have total control over their wireless creations.

Using these ESP32 boards, GreatScott! tested out the range of Zigbee communication. It was found that the ESP32-H2 board could maintain contact for a respectable 85 meters. But the ESP32-C6 was successfully tested communicating at a whopping 260 meters. That was much farther than any other wireless technology GreatScott! previously tested, so if you are fed up with Wi-Fi range extenders, Zigbee might be worth checking out.

Further comparisons with a Wi-Fi version of one of the smart buttons demonstrated that Zigbee consumes far less power. This feature makes it practical for many Zigbee devices to run on battery power, which can come in very handy for certain applications.

One downside noted in the course of the evaluations was that data transfer speeds for Zigbee are quite low when compared with Wi-Fi. This may not matter when turning on a light bulb or checking the temperature, but if lots of data needs to be moved from one device to another, Zigbee will struggle.

If you are planning to upgrade your home automation system, Zigbee is worth a closer look. Check out the video below for the complete evaluation.