How to Transform a RaspberryPi Into a Universal Zigbee and Z-Wave Bridge
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.