Zigbee

Recently the outside lights here decided to switch off at random intervals for no apparent reason. There are 5 different controllers, two being Zigbee bulbs and the others Zigbee switches. All use 2.4GHz. All had been running reliably for maybe a year. On/off cycles are controlled by scripts on the server as well as manually via an app. In each case whichever set of lights had gone out did report as being off and would turn back on via the app. Some days there was no issue, on others at least one would go off at some point. The Zigbee bulbs never failed, just the switches. There was no evidence of any commands being sent to turn the lights off, but there was the occasional error being reported. Rebooting the server made no difference. A power cycle of the server seems to have cured the issue so I am considering it likely to be the Zigbee transceiver itself. This is now nagging at me to figure out what happened and presumably it will reoccur some time in the future. Too many other things to sort out though!

I have always dabbled in home automation, pretty much since before it even became a thing. Most of the control was, and mostly still is via X10 devices and controllers which use mains signalling. This is rather old fashioned now and, being mains signalling is susceptible to interference. At one stage the outdoor light, which are controlled via an X10 appliance module in the workshop were very intermittent, until I discovered the wall-wart on one of the internal cameras was injecting awful noise that caused a scanner AM to buzz wildly when held near any mains outlet in the house! Anyway, that isn’t radio related, but this is… enter Zigbee. I have not read very far into this yet but it uses 2.4GHz among other frequencies for its signalling and there are lots of modules available. I plan to change our two dimmers to Zigbee and it will be pretty much plug and play. Apart from removing the mains signalling path the modules communicate both ways, so the controller can see their status as well as control them. Some of the newer X10 modules do this but very few of them and none of the ones I have. The current…