New Shelly Smart Devices Have One-Mile Range, Thanks To Z-Wave

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Smart home devices compatible with the Matter standard have garnered most of our attention lately, but the compelling features in the latest generation of Z-Wave chips convinced the IoT developer Shelly Group to build no fewer than 11 new products powered by Z-Wave technology. The new collection includes a smart plug, in-wall dimmers, relays, and various sensors aimed at DIYers, installers, and commercial builders. Citing the ability of Z-Wave 800 (aka Z-Wave Long Range or LR) chips to operate IoT devices over extremely long range -- up to 1 mile, line of sight -- while running on battery power for up to 10 years, Shelly Group CTO Leon Kralj said "Shelly is helping break down smart home connectivity barriers, empowering homeowners, security installers, and commercial property owners and managers with unmatched range, scalability, and energy efficiency to redefine their automation experience."

[...] While most homeowners won't need to worry about the number of IoT devices their networks can support, commercial builders will appreciate the scalability of Z-Wave 800-powered devices -- namely, you can deploy as many as 4,000 nodes on a single mesh network. That's a 20x increase over what was possible with previous generations of the chip. And since Z-Wave LR is backward compatible with those previous generations, there should be no worries about integrating the new devices into existing networks. Shelly says all 11 of its new Z-Wave 800-powered IoT devices will be available in the first half of 2025. The new Shelly devices will be available in the U.S. in the first half of 2025.

Here's a list of the devices enhanced with the new long-range capabilities:
- Shelly Wave Plug US
- Shelly Wave Door/Window
- Shelly Wave H&T
- Shelly Wave Motion
- Shelly Wave Dimmer
- Shelly Wave Pro Dimmer 1 PM
- Shelly Wave Pro Dimmer 2 PM
- Shelly Wave 1
- Shelly Wave 1 PM
- Shelly Wave 2 PM
- Shelly Wave Shutter

Exactly what I needed

[memory_register]

To prank my neighbors.

Yawn

[boulat]

I've been using nRF24L01 for almost 8 years now and regularly get over a mile range.

Low cost, long-range, low battery consumption, getting anywhere between 250 Kbps to 2 Mbit depending on range and error rate (it will adjust protocol and compression automatically). You would need to add some shielding and capacitors to fine-tune for longer range.

You can deploy full TCP/IP stack with included libraries https://nrf24.github.io/RF24Et... [github.io] and even build a full mesh network.

Re:

[viperidaenz]

Cool story bro.
The ZGM230S uses less power than an nRF24L01, when transmitting at the same power level
Less than half the power when receiving
8x less power in shutdown mode
Less power with the built in MCU running than the nRF in sleep mode.

The selling point here is low power and long range.

I'm not saying the nRF24 is bad, but it is 10 years old now. It also requires a separate MCU to really do anything.

is 1 mile range enough?

[dfghjk]

Finally a standard suitable for the size of ShanghaiBill's house.

Deployed this in my mansion

[madbrain]

Zoom Z-Wave LR ZST39 . ZEN76 LR wall switches. Using home assistant and z-wave JS UI.

The range is definitely improved since Z-wave JS added LR support.

However, one LR switch in my garage regularly goes "dead" in my dashboard . I have had to add an automation to ping it every 5 minutes and wake it up. It's at most 100 ft away from the Z-wave stick.

Unfortunately, LR devices don't support mesh. They don't support associations, either. They are a compromise.

I also use Yolink devices, which use LoRA as well. Th

Droid

[GrahamJ]

"redefine their automation experience"

It was a perfectly fine announcement and then they had to go ruin it with this marketing droid speak smh