ZemiSmart Discount Day at AliExpress

ZmiSmart

Regular readers will know I go out of my way to avoid anything remotely approaching outright advertising – after all I do this absolutely for fun, not profit. But read on, I feel obliged to help out ZemiSmart.

Firstly they sent me some kit not knowing me from Adam (as we say in the UK occasionally). The first item I opened was a Smart Blinds controller. I was going to review this (and will at some point in the future) but it needs one of several types of blind – with beaded control strings of one kind or another – well, mine are NOT beaded, so that review went out of the window as it were. Hah, I just realised the irony of that as I was writing it.

As you can see I was all ready to go but the mechanism just won’t handle my kind of blinds. Oh, well. I checked out the controls and it is all good stuff, the unit comes with power supply and a separate stick on solar-panel/sensor, can be controlled (up/down) manually, automatically (light sensor) or with an App. They also sent me a shedload of Zigbee stuff which I can’t usse yet as I need a Zigbee gateway. I was quite open and told them that this was an issue and they quickly rsponded with an offer to send me a Zigbee hub. It is on it’s way.

I’ve no idea of the quality of their kit yet though they do more gadgets than you can shake a stick at. SO, I can’t write about the blinds controller as our blinds are the wrong type (non-beaded) so instead I promised to link to their Zemismart AliExpress 11/11 discount day while I await the Zigbee hub… can’t be any harm in that… I spend half my idling hours on AliExpress or Banggood (and I know that many of you do too from your feedback) so that’s not much of a leap of faith!!

Warrning, the following links could take up much of your time… I won’t be anywhere near the first to talk about Zigbee when I do… and I’ve been fighting it for the longest time but it seems it is of great interest to some of you so enjoy… our friend at NonEnoughTech discusses the subject and there’s a Node-Red node for Zigbee (direct Hobbyquaker link on GitHub) if you want to read more).

8 thoughts on “ZemiSmart Discount Day at AliExpress

  1. It’s might be slightly out of topic, but looking at the market trends somehow I feel that BT5 or to be more precise BT Mesh gains speed and popularity amongst IOT companies. I would really appreciate if Peter, maybe with the help of Adrian and Antonio, will try to look over the general situation and predict the future. OK, it’s more like a wish to Santa Peter Claus 🙂

    1. generally, we prefer wifi because of “hackability” and easy, but the BIG drawback of it is power consumption, where bt and zigbee devices instead excel… given their nature of pure “sending out data” devices just in case of events, too, of course… which makes them the way to go in case of battery operation… but, thanks to projects like openmqttgateway, you can easily make a multipurpose multiprotocol gateway from/to bt/rf/zb/etc and wifi 🙂

      1. I will definitely need to experiment more with openmqttgateway but as far ask know it does not support ZigBee, for this you need to have on the very same device zigbee2mqtt running (which I have and work really great!)

    2. It depeds on length of prediction. In near future Zigbee will won because Zigbee Mesh really working and all big IoT makers moving to it.
      You cat buy full set of sensors and actors for you purpose.
      For example xiaomi has 30+ different zigbee devices in production, Ikea has 15+ devices.
      As for BT5 there is no IoT devices working with bt-mesh. Or i don’t know such devices. May be it will win in long future. But not in next five years.

      And as Antonio said now you can integrate all devices so transport protocol will not matter.

  2. Hi, Pete!
    Btw, it’s all made by Tuya Smart, the invisible IoT monster. Same for a lot of other brands.
    You can compare this link: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32983001822.html
    and this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000196838216.html
    and this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000259523209.html

    I’m glad they give you another material vote for zigbee. I bet you will be there in next few month. And i bet you will change their hub to something like Zigbee Stick on TI CC2531 + Zigbee2MQTT. Because it’s seems to be the mainline at least for next few years.

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