WZWave Home

Overview

The goal of this project is to create a Java-native, open-source library for controlling Z-Wave PC controllers.

Z-Wave is a wireless protocol used for home automation. It use low-power RF to control smart devices such as lights, power outlets, thermostats and more. A PC controller (e.g. a USB dongle) provides applications a gateway to monitor and control a wireless Z-Wave device network. More information can be found at this Wikipedia article.

Why Z-Wave?

• The Z-Wave alliance has over 250 independent manufacturers as of 2014 (source: Wikipedia) including big names like GE, ADT, Ingersoll-Rand and Trane. 
• Z-Wave smart devices are relatively inexpensive, readily available and interoperable between manufacturers (something that can't be said for some other wireless home automation technologies out there).
• The Z-Wave device network uses mesh technology to improve both its range and reliability. Basically, the more powered devices you add, the stronger the network becomes.
  

Why WZWave?

The biggest drawback with Z-Wave is the PC controller serial protocol is not freely available. To obtain official information requires signing an NDA and paying a hefty fee to get the Z-Wave SDK. As I understand it, software developed under the NDA cannot be made freely available. Hence the need for projects like this.

In my research, I was unable to find any native Java libraries that would interface with a Z-Wave controller. Granted, there were libraries that used JNI to wrapper the excellent open-zwave library but that meant deferring most of the work to a binary library. Thus, WZWave was created to be a fully Java-native solution.

The project was created using a combination of studying online resources, studying the open-zwave project as well as copious amounts of reverse engineering. 

Note: The project is not affiliated or endorsed by Sigma Designs and none of their IP was used in the creation of this library.

Status

WZWave is still very early days and is under active development. Only a limited subset of devices have been tested but support will continue to grow over time.

I encourage anyone that wants to get involved to please do so. The project really needs developers to get involved to help increase robustness and device support! 

If you're interested in getting involved, sign up at the Hobson Community Forum to let me know.

License

This project is being made freely available under the Eclipse Public License v1.0.

Getting Started

The source code is available from the project's GitHub page and is a standard Maven project.

WZwave uses the RXTX library to access the serial port, so you will need to have the appropriate native library for the platform you are running it on.

There are some platform-specific steps that need to be performed in order to use the library successfully:

• Mac Setup

Feedback

A forum has been set up for the WZWave project on the Hobson community forum:

Hobson Community Forum

Contributors

• Thanks to Atlassian for generously donating a license for their Bamboo CI server and providing hosting for both JIRA and Confluence.
• Thanks to EJ Technologies for generously donating a license for their JProfiler java profiler and their install4j installer builder.