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In the last post, I looked at solutions for starting out my automated home and decided to go with z-wave as the primary protocol to start investing in. Now, we need to start with the central point, the primary controller which is going to act as the central hub for the network.
The first thing that I needed was a controller. There are quite a few options for this, including off-the-shelf options from companies like Fibaro and SmartThings as well as applications which can be installed on a home server. My initial concern was this is a fairly new market that isn’t very big yet and I didn’t know which of the companies were going to last and keep supporting the hardware that they had made. There was of course the cost aspect with the majority of off-the-shelf solutions costing over £1
Like the SmartThings hub, both OpenHAB and Domoticz offer support for protocols other than zwave, including Phillips Hue, Nest, MQTT, IFTTT and Twitter. So they can integrate with other solutions that might be useful.
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