Can Almond+ work with WIFI based sensors ? Or rant about sensors availabbility

[xchg.ca]

I tired looking for sensors I need for Zigbee and ZWave  technologies.
Looking for temp and humidity sensor without any extra features, plain little box battery powered, sitting in the corner, I know that technology is pretty simple for such device
So I surprised to see 50+ bucks and 100+ for zigbee device doing such stupid simple thing. More to add - selection is pretty bad as well... 1 or 2 and almost nothing available in Canada
So I decided to whip up something myself. And obvious choice is WIFI,
But I would like to know can I treat WIFI devices as sensors.... because from first  glance it is impossible. But I hope we can have such feature in future, because :
I think Zigbee and Z-wave because of high licensing cost going to shoot themselves in the foot.
WIFI and B4LE are the way to go.

Also If you know about decent z-wave / zigby tem and humidity sensors... please share.

[matt]

I tired looking for sensors I need for Zigbee and ZWave  technologies.
Looking for temp and humidity sensor without any extra features, plain little box battery powered, sitting in the corner, I know that technology is pretty simple for such device
So I surprised to see 50+ bucks and 100+ for zigbee device doing such stupid simple thing. More to add - selection is pretty bad as well... 1 or 2 and almost nothing available in Canada
So I decided to whip up something myself. And obvious choice is WIFI,
But I would like to know can I treat WIFI devices as sensors.... because from first  glance it is impossible. But I hope we can have such feature in future, because :
I think Zigbee and Z-wave because of high licensing cost going to shoot themselves in the foot.
WIFI and B4LE are the way to go.

Also If you know about decent z-wave / zigby tem and humidity sensors... please share.

Yeah, I built my own temp/humidity/PIR motion sensor (and IR blaster actually) with my RaspberryPi I had lying around, and I have it interfacing via tcp with the A+ through mochad. None of it is very complicated, but then again, I'm very cheap and I like tinkering. If you have interest in going that route, I can give you more info, but there are indeed simpler but more expensive options. This is the cheapest I could find when I was looking, but I don't know about A+ support:

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=122&cp_id=12212&cs_id=1221201&p_id=10796&seq=1&format=2

But to answer part of your question, I have not found a way to create sensors (other than manually editing the DeviceList.xml and rebooting the A+, not recommended), and definitely no way to make the sensor values appear in the A+. I would love to see a "dummy" device that allows such things to happen, but it doesn't seem likely in the near future (if ever).

[LGNilsson]

Well, Z-Wave is quite expensive, but ZigBee is not, at least not in terms of components costs.
A good temperature/humidity sensor can be expensive, but shouldn't be needed for consumer applications.
There are no licensing costs involved with Z-Wave or ZigBee, just certification costs.

That said, these devices are quite expensive in retail for one simple reason, demand, or rather lack there of.
Let's say one of these sensors costs $15 to make, then the company wants 20% maring, the distributor puts another 50-100% and the retailer puts another 10-20% and all of a sudden that device is not that cheap anymore.
Then when there's only demand for say 100 units a month, the production volume is going to be low and that increases the component cost and adds things like storage costs, as the manufacturer would make at least 1,000 units at a time.

Anyhow, I'm just trying to explain the reason why Z-Wave and ZigBee devices are as expensive as they are in retail. We want to start changing this from next year, but I'm not sure we'll have a temp/humidity sensor straight away. It's actually a fairly simple thing to make as long as you take a couple of things into consideration when you design it.

Sadly I don't have any good suggestions on what you should get, the Monoprice PIR works with the Almond+, but it seems like we haven't updated the UI for the temperature part yet, but it's coming.