Dremor

I had some difficulties too with Zigbee pairing, that's one of the shortcomings that Matter fixes with their QR Code pairing. On my case it was just about understanding that you have to put both the device and the coordinator in pairing mode for the "interview" to happen. And that is has to be close to any device of the target network that isn't battery powered (they can do the interview on the coordinator behalf).

I stopped using WiFi devices for the same reason, but found out about Tasmota, an open-source firmware for ESP devices. It requires a local coordinator, but never send anything to Google and the likes. It can be hard to flash, but some vendor, like Nous, offers pre-flashed devices. Some of them are also Matter compatible (if it has recent hardware as old ESP device has too little rom to handle the Matter code).

Interoperability comes from standardization, which Zigbee sorely lacked. But actors like Tuya or Leroy Merlin built their own standard over Zigbee, which means anything that has "works with Tuya" will work with any Tuya coordinator of any brand (same for Leroy Merlin ecosystem). And even those who don't usually mostly works.

With that you'd get ZWave reliability, most, if not all, of its security features, with Zigbee lower price. And they still works great with third party coordinator.

But it is true that Z-Wave uses lower frequency than Zigbee (868MHz vs 2.3GHz). It means lower frequency interferences, and better reliability over high distances.

Zwave stuff are way overpriced, even comparing to the wifi or zigbee quivalent.

As an examble I get good quality (aka not an unknown chineese brand) Zigbee smart object for 2 to 5 times lower price than what a Zwave equivalent.
Same goes for wifi one, which are roughly the same price as the Zigbee stuff.

The only good aspect of Zwave was the security protocol that was more robust than the Zigbee equivalent (albeit Zigbee 3.0 closed the gap) and more standardized endpoints. Matter objective is to get those two to surpass their ZWave equivalent.

Unfortunately my gateway (which is compatible with both Zigbee 3.0 and ZWave btw) is still waiting for its Matter/Thread upgrade, so I can't try it yet, but compairing my Zwave objects with my Zigbee ones, I see no point of buying the former over the later.

Congratulation, you are being upgraded. Please do not resist. And pay while we are at it.

Like the tides, what went up will eventually go down.

Well, that's what everyone should be doing instead of dumping all our e-waste on developing countries.

As ads revenue is crashing, they want to be able to rely on something less easy to quantify in order to modulate it. Previously they had to pay x cents per click, now they can just divide the little they earn arbitrarily in order to keep in the green.

Firefox and Duckduckgo. What else?

Hello fellow bird watcher.

I also use it a lot for unit tests. It helps a lot when you have to write multiple edge cases, and even find new one at times. Like putting a random int in an enum field (enumField = (myEnum)1000), I didn't knew you could do that...

Especially since some South Korean smartphone brand illustrated how it is a bad idea to have a bad quality battery in a smartphone.

Spoiler: It gets hot. Very hot.

Texas left the room.