Selection and difference of Wifi, Bluetooth and ZigBee

Now that the network and network devices have become popular, people increasingly hope that more devices can be connected to the Internet, and remote viewing and control can be easily realized through mobile phones, especially those common electrical appliances and furniture at home. In the movie, people have imagined more than once how comfortable life would be if the entire home was networked and intelligent.

Today, with the development of science and technology, dreams are gradually coming into reality, and more and more devices can be controlled remotely. However, if you look closely, you will find that the control of different devices uses different technical methods.

So, what mainstream technologies are available for smart homes today? What is the difference between them? How to choose?

WiFi

The first thing I have to mention is Wifi as we know it. Every time you go to a new place, connecting your mobile phone to Wi-Fi is already the first requirement of most people, which also shows how popular Wi-Fi technology is. The mobile phone is already an essential tool for people to travel and live, and the mobile phone itself is a Wifi device, so most people can quickly connect with other Wifi devices through their mobile phones, and access and control them.

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Wifi devices are easy to use, with fast transmission speed and low latency, and can be directly connected to devices or accessed through the Internet, which can easily meet application scenarios that other wireless technologies cannot meet, such as high-definition video transmission and remote real-time control. Therefore, many networked appliances that we see every day are connected through Wifi.

But on the other hand, the channel of Wifi itself is crowded, and the number of simultaneous connections supported by the router is limited. If there are too many connected devices, it is easy to drop the line. Moreover, Wifi power consumption is high, and Wifi devices without continuous power supply cannot work for a long time. If they are not plugged in, they need to be frequently charged or replaced.

Bluetooth

In addition to Wifi, there is another wireless technology that we often come into contact with and use every day, that is Bluetooth. As early as the early days of smartphones, Bluetooth has become a standard feature of mobile phones. From the earliest Bluetooth transmission of mobile phones to the unlocking of shared bicycles today, although Bluetooth is not as ubiquitous as Wifi, it has silently accompanied us for many years.

Compared with Wifi, Bluetooth, or BLE technology, it seems that it is not brilliant. It cannot perform high-speed transmission of a large amount of data like Wifi, nor can it communicate with Internet data for ultra-remote control.

So is it really not as good as Wifi?

Not really. As mentioned before, Wifi is not omnipotent, and the high power consumption limits the application environment of Wifi, while BLE technology is just characterized by low power consumption. Excellent low power consumption performance ensures that BLE devices can still have a very good working time when powered by batteries, which makes devices that cannot use Wi-Fi due to power supply problems also have the ability to easily interact with mobile phones. Just like our daily sports bracelets, smart body fat scales and other devices all interact with us through BLE.

ZigBee

Finally, let’s talk about ZigBee again. For a person who doesn't know much about wireless technology, ZigBee may be an unfamiliar term. For many people, they know what Wi-Fi is and have heard of Bluetooth because these are two everyday, inherent features of mobile phones.

However, ZigBee is not. It cannot directly interact with mobile phones. It can be said to be very inconvenient for application scenarios such as smart homes where the user experience is very intuitive. What about around?

But this does not mean that ZigBee is useless. ZigBee devices have low power consumption, self-organizing network, and a large number of nodes. Although they cannot directly interact with mobile phones, they can also access the network through an additional gateway. Wait for the scene.