After being quite successful in installing hass.io on my Raspberry and adding z-wave capability and Plejd support I was looking to expand the capabilities to my system even further. The low price of 433 MHz devices caught my attention and after narrowing down my seach for an easy to use gateway to either Telldus tellstick znet lite v2 or an Rfxcom transceiver I opted for the Tellstick. Boy, did I regret that decision.
This is what I experienced.
In addition to the gateway I also bought on/off outlet, door and window sensor, temperature and humidity sensor and motion sensor from Telldus. Apart from the temperature and humidity sensor that actually work pretty good I would say that the other devices are of poor quality. Look at this post for more information on what devices I have tested.
Reliability, ease of use and integration with hass.io was really below my expectations and I cannot recommend these devices to anyone. I have spent some 30-40 hours in troubleshooting; adding and removing devices from the gateway, testing different locations of the gateway to rule out interference, tried local and cloud access all with disappointing results.
As examples both the door and window sensor and the motion sensor were very unreliable. The motion sensor triggered close to 100% to nearby movement (indicated by the green LED) but successful reporting to the gateway was at an estimated 70%. The events that were sucessfully reported to the gateway should then be reported further to the Telldus Live! cloud and in turn update the Telldus app (and hass.io in my case). The hit rate of the last step was also close to 70% which in total made the devices basically useless since you want >99,9% reliability from devices such as door and motion sensors and I got approximately 50%.
On top of the reliability issues I experienced the latency to be poor; a successful detection could take several seconds before being reported to the Telldus app (and hass.io). Again, useless in most applications where I use motion and door sensors.
In the case of communication with hass.io I managed to connect hass.io directly to the gateway by adding the following code to configuration.yaml to get around the problem with cloud latency.
I should also mention that I experimented with setting scan_interval to one (1) second to reduce latencey without proving a real improvement. This change is done in the config/.storage/core.config_entries file.
Due to all my issues with their products I had lengthy conversations with their technical support which was polite and fast in replying but it was obvious that they did not have much power to solve problems and their strategy seemed to be to flood me with counter questions rather that reading my trouble reports in detail.
Looking at the other devices I bought; I managed to add the on/off outlet device into Telldus Live but I never (not even once) managed to communicate with it either through Telldus Live, their app or hass.io. The only devices from Telldus still in my system are the temperature and humidity sensors, the other devices has been recycled as electronics waste.
A time consuming and rather expensive experience with limited results.
Please let me know in the comments field if you have any comments or questions.
This is what I experienced.
In addition to the gateway I also bought on/off outlet, door and window sensor, temperature and humidity sensor and motion sensor from Telldus. Apart from the temperature and humidity sensor that actually work pretty good I would say that the other devices are of poor quality. Look at this post for more information on what devices I have tested.
Reliability, ease of use and integration with hass.io was really below my expectations and I cannot recommend these devices to anyone. I have spent some 30-40 hours in troubleshooting; adding and removing devices from the gateway, testing different locations of the gateway to rule out interference, tried local and cloud access all with disappointing results.
 |
| Figure 1. Telldus is a Swedish company that develop and sell components for home automation. |
As examples both the door and window sensor and the motion sensor were very unreliable. The motion sensor triggered close to 100% to nearby movement (indicated by the green LED) but successful reporting to the gateway was at an estimated 70%. The events that were sucessfully reported to the gateway should then be reported further to the Telldus Live! cloud and in turn update the Telldus app (and hass.io in my case). The hit rate of the last step was also close to 70% which in total made the devices basically useless since you want >99,9% reliability from devices such as door and motion sensors and I got approximately 50%.
 |
| Figure 2. Pairing and administration of Telldus components are done at Telldus Live! |
On top of the reliability issues I experienced the latency to be poor; a successful detection could take several seconds before being reported to the Telldus app (and hass.io). Again, useless in most applications where I use motion and door sensors.
In the case of communication with hass.io I managed to connect hass.io directly to the gateway by adding the following code to configuration.yaml to get around the problem with cloud latency.
tellduslive:
host: 192.168.1.68
scan_interval: 1
I should also mention that I experimented with setting scan_interval to one (1) second to reduce latencey without proving a real improvement. This change is done in the config/.storage/core.config_entries file.
{
"connection_class": "local_poll",
"data": {
"host": "192.168.1.242",
"scan_interval": 5,
"session": {
"host": "192.168.1.242",
"token": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
}
Due to all my issues with their products I had lengthy conversations with their technical support which was polite and fast in replying but it was obvious that they did not have much power to solve problems and their strategy seemed to be to flood me with counter questions rather that reading my trouble reports in detail.
Looking at the other devices I bought; I managed to add the on/off outlet device into Telldus Live but I never (not even once) managed to communicate with it either through Telldus Live, their app or hass.io. The only devices from Telldus still in my system are the temperature and humidity sensors, the other devices has been recycled as electronics waste.
A time consuming and rather expensive experience with limited results.
Please let me know in the comments field if you have any comments or questions.
Part of the problems are due to the nature of the 433 mhz ecosystem, I think (no reliable transmit protocol, no fault tolerance, every devicei mplments their own version of it) - but in general I have a better experience with the rfxcom devices - though I never rely on them for something that needs to work in a guaranteed way... So yes for temperature sensors, no for motion/door/... at least not for anything important.
ReplyDeleteI have come to pretty much the same conclusion, what I have realized and what bothers me is that Telldus sells devices that by nature needs to be reliable (motion sensor, door sensor, ...) that uses unreliable technology like 433 MHz.
DeleteIt would be really interesting to see if I would have had better experience with an rfxcom based system.