Indigo Domotics

I completely agree on sticking within the confines of your location's rules and regulations. (I was a licensed FM radio transmitter operator back in the day when people listened to this thing called "Radio".)

I would point out that the range of a residential Z-Wave transmitter is not likely to affect things like a commercial radio mic would. If I can't get two devices to communicate with each other when they're on the opposite sides of my house, they're not likely to affect the local television station. But I guess that's kind of the point.

Busta999 wrote:

I hear you.

I didn't understand the range/power of the zwave transmitter.

Does open up ideas that I did not think were possible though.

With that sort of range I could actually ally set up automated processes for my whole street and offer it as a managed home automation service.

If it can effect commercial airplane navigation I could easily run a smal town with a single Vera box.

I hadn't tested it, I just assumed it had a very limited range, i.e. House, not street, city grade.

Should I be worried about the radiation coming from my USB zwave transmitter?

But seriously, you are right, all the same I had not anticipated zwave signals having such a reach.

There's a big difference (as in several orders of magnitude) between the signal strength it takes to carry intelligence (ie turn off device 17 or Device 22 temperature is 18.2) and interfering (ie jamming) other devices separated by large distances from communicating when one of them is much closer to your transmitter than the one it's trying to communicate with... you can't use a standard z-wave device to control the whole apartment building, but if a device goes bonkers and starts transmitting continuously, it can insure that NOBODY can use z-wave devices until it's shut down. And radiolocation devices like GPS, LORAN, etc are particularly susceptible to such interference because they use a very subtle phase changes in the radio signals to get their accuracy from a kilometer or so down to the 1 or 2 meter level.

Someone suggested using Vera as an "extension" to the Indigo. I tried it, and I had such problems with the platform that I gave up on it and sent it back. I realize that they (Vera-land) like to coddle their end users, but the product didn't measure up for me.

Instead, I am trying the same approach using the Universal Devices box, and it works quite well. I am extending my home automation "universe" from the main building on our property to two other buildings using the Universal Devices box. I have Zwave, Insteon, and X-10 on those boxes "slaved" back to the Indigo box.

I had to do a lot of work on the plugin (which has been updated in the library), but I'm very happy with the results and I can see that it will scale quite well if I need to add multiple Z-Wave in the future.