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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

I've helped lots of people with home automation Network build outs l; the biggest factor is the RF environment.

If you're fortunate enough to not be battery constrained at most endpoints and can put a high quality Wi-Fi access point in an optimal location than Wi-Fi is incredibly reliable.

The tooling for inspecting all layers of a Wi-Fi network is infinitely more accessible and mature and that certainly helps; I can't go to My local big box store and get a USB thread dongle for 20 bucks that will just work on a Lennox computer and integrate nicely with Wireshark out of the box...

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No, you have to order it from Mouser for $16 instead.

Fixed link: https://www.mouser.com/en/ProductDetail/Nordic-Semiconductor...

And there’s a little configuration: https://wiki.makerdiary.com/nrf52840-mdk-usb-dongle/guides/n...

Dead product link

Sorry I thought I was removing tracking bits from the URL. It’s fixed now.

I have a Unifi home network with two Wifi 7 access points and gigabit ethernet. For home automation, I went with ZWave and do not regret it at all. It's been rock solid and I've never felt the need to get a dongle to debug the traffic. I don't want to be working through all of the WiFi baggage with my home automation devices. I recently introduced some Zigbee bulbs (hue and cheapos from Amazon) and they've been mostly "fine", albeit with lower range.

> For home automation, I went with ZWave and do not regret it at all. It's been rock solid and I've never felt the need to get a dongle to debug the traffic.

That's because zwave requires everything go through certification process. You pay more for this, but things generally just work.

It's an entirely different situation in zigbee land though.

I stick with ESPHome and MQTT because I can inspect and modify the behaviors of everything with free and open tools.

Wi-Fi was never unreliable. The devices that used WiFi were much worse to work with and setup.

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