Using z-wave for a handful of years, I’m missing some devices that would expand usability quite a bit in my eye.
- Simple contact sensor. So far, I have removed the reed contact from a door sensor and replaced it with a push button, in order to have a doorbell contact triggering several chimes at the workshop, at the office, at the house. It’s a bad hack and the battery life is not so good. Make that a 4-channel contact sensor with a decent battery life, and I’m in.
- Pulse counter. Something that counts pulses from a flow meter, electricity meter, anemometer, and reports at intervals or after a given amount of pulses.
And generally, I’d like to see some kind of external battery expansion for devices, maybe something like “magsave” that holds onto the device with a tiny external cable and gold plated contacts. That should not be too expensive to implement. With a growing number of devices, there is also a growing number of devices that need battery replacement, and frankly, a 26650 Li-FePo4 cell instead of a CR2025 button gets me through years instead of months.
