Welcome
August 30th, 2008
I’ve been interested in Home Automation for several years, although that interest has never actually extended to doing anything until now.
ZigBee first sparked my interest. The idea of having lots of devices spread about your house, each relaying information to each via radio other is very appealing. I have a house built in 1969 by an architect that was seriously into concrete. No easy way to run new wires throughout the house.
Having a mesh of devices means that each devices does not have to broadcast a strong radio signal, which in turn means that each device does not have strong power requirements. Some devices could run for years off of a couple of batteries.
While ZigBee is interesting, I wasn’t able to find any consumer devices available for sale to me in Europe. While doing my latest batch of ZigBee research I came across Z-Wave, which is a similar technology, but is available for use in the real world.
I now have several Z-Wave devices installed and running in my home office:
A couple of Motion Sensors (ACT ZIR010 / ZIR000): 
A dimmer switch (ACT ZDW232 / ZDW120):
A plugin-in switch (ACT ZDP200 / ZRP100):
… all purchased from HomeSeer. I’ve bought the European versions, since I live in Switzerland, however I’ve also shown the US versions (Z-Wave in Europe operates on a different radio frequency to the US).
I have ordered a bunch more devices to install throughout the house.
In this blog I intend to talk about how this goes, from the initial purchase experience, reviews of the devices themselves, how I installed them, and how I configured them.
Since I am also a developer I intend to control some of the devices from my home computer and I’ll explain how I went about this,
November 21st, 2008 at 1:43 am
Hi Damian,
Found your blog while looking for drivers that didn’t crash my vista machine everytime I tried controlling my Zwave network from controlthink.net api.
Finally someone in europe with the setup.
Greetings from Seb (the Netherlands)
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Dear Damian,
your information is very useful. In fact i went more or less thru the same quest. Since i develop a communicator for wheel-chair users, i went trough all wireless options. The design is in its final stage. Remain a few critical issues to be solved however and i wondered if you could help me.
Our software goes on the zwave net via Thinkstick. Now this creates a problem since we cannot connect a USB device directly on the tablet pc. We consider using the serial interface from ACT, but that also means that software has to be re-written.
It would be nice to read your comments / ideas.
Thanks,
Jacob
June 4th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Hello Damien,
Thanks for creating such a useful blog. Im in the process of building a house in CH, and I am interested in having Z-Wave light switches installed. The electrical planner isnt too keen on the idea and is concerned that Z-Wave products might not be certified for use in Switzerland. Can you offer any advice on this?
Thanks and Kind Regards
Paul
September 30th, 2009 at 3:46 am
Dear damian,
i wanted to ask you , have u tried any of the schlage locks ?
October 1st, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Hi Alsharif,
I have not tried them - but I’d be interested in hearing your experiences if you try them out yourself.
Regards,
Damian
October 1st, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Hi Paul,
I can’t advise re your reluctant electrician - since they conform to EU standards I’d have expected they would be good for Switzerland too, but I’m not certain.
Regards,
Damian