Transform a RaspberryPi into a universal Zigbee and Z-Wave bridge

An updated version of this article is available on the Platypush blog.

Home automation comes with plenty of potential to make our lives easier. But in order to succeed in its task, it often requires you to fill your house with bridges that can connect your smart devices to your Wi-Fi network. Unless you buy a smart device that communicates directly over Wi-Fi (like a TP-Link or Belkin smart plug), odds are that many of your favourite smart devices use either Bluetooth, Zigbee or Z-Wave to communicate. These protocols solve some of the issues of Wi-Fi when it comes to smart devices — like latency, centralised topology and relatively high power requirements — but they do require some physical hardware in between to do the smart protocol <-> Wi-Fi translation and make the devices actually controllable from a Wi-Fi-connected client. The bad thing is that you’ll probably need a different bridge or hub for each class of devices you want to use. Philips Hue lights come with their own bridge, same for Lutron, same for HomeKit, same for Belkin, same for Switchbot, and the list goes on. What’s ironic is that most of these devices actually speak the same protocol (either Zigbee or Z-Wave) but, in most of the cases, they can only control their own devices. Try to imagine an alternative reality where all the ethernet cards can send and receive…