Radio Frequency (RF) & Wireless Design

In the era of hyper-connectivity with mobile devices, its become common place to see multiple wireless devices emerge and are now starting to become part of the a modern home.

The two most basic wireless standards : Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have merged with other legacy standards such as X-10, Ant, and ZigBee wherein the best of all standards are now merged into cross-compatibility.

Bluetooth was once limited to single devices and only point-to-point, and ZigBee was used for low power sensor mesh networks. But with the emergence of Thread for Bluetooth, the ZigBee group has been reformulated to support Thread for Bluetooth nodes as well as IP identification thru Wi-Fi hubs as well.

This article details out the changes in the home and now that there is a common platform for development and inter-operability, I expect that the explosion will really start to take off.

https://semiengineering.com/smart-home-device-communication-in-the-era-of-hyperconnectivity/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-20211118

There are some hold-outs that challenge Bluetooth and would prefer to use a low powered version of Wi-Fi, but until then there are too many entrenched mobile devices and sensor nodes that make the singularity convergence difficult.

There will always be exceptions to the rule such as LoRa WAN and others, but for the most ubiquitous home solutions will be coming from those that support Bluetooth Thread mesh networking locally and Wi-Fi gateways into the cloud.