Pair your Zigbee gear
Using low-cost widely available smart lighting is easier than you might think, thanks to open protocols and open standards.
When it comes to automating your home, there’s a wide array of products available on the W market that make controlling everything a breeze. This is all down to low-cost open standards that can be easily integrated into systems you control. The most widely used are Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread. These allow instructions, such as a smart light bulb illuminating a certain colour at a specific time, to be sent to multiple devices at once, providing you have a compatible smart home hub that can talk to all of your smart home devices.
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The Zigbee compatibility repo is an excellent resource when deciding how to configure devices or which devices to purchase: https://Zigbee.blakadder.com.
Unlike Wi-Fi, these smart home standards use a tiny amount of power, which means many smart home devices can run on batteries that don’t need changing or recharging for months or even years.
Add and configure your ZHA integration.
The one we’re interested in is Zigbee, which is a wireless networking standard, and its specifications are maintained and updated by the non-profit Zigbee Alliance organisation, which was established in 2002. Zigbee is certainly an unusual moniker – it turns out that it got its name from how honeybees communicate with each other by moving, which is also known as the waggle dance. There are more than 400 different technology firms that support the standard, including behemoths such as Apple, Amazon and Google, alongside well-known names such as Belkin, Huawei, Ikea, Intel, Qualcomm and Signify, as well as many others.
The Zigbee standard can broadcast data across distances of approximately 75-100 metres indoors or around 300 metres in the open air, meaning it can easily offer strong, stable coverage in large homes.