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.

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…

And F-droid.

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.

And I confirm they can go f*** themselves.

You can get a phone number for a little more than a dollar a month at OVH. You can just redirect all call to voicemail and check once or twice a month and call it the day.

It was at first, then they became a for profit organization, Xamarin, who was bought by Microsoft.

You can use a A+E card on a E slot, that’s basically why they were made, to be compatible with both.

I have such setup on my desktop computer (A+E Intel AX210 in a E slot PCIe daughter board).

No, thank you.

That article, which is from 2015 btw, explain it well. NPAPI caused crashes, and a lot of security issues, that’s why they were removed.

This should probably be posted on a programing community.

Removed the parental advice part. I didn’t want to be an asshole, believe me.

To me it looks like you don’t have enough power, either on the Pi4 side to decode, or the mini-pc to encode.