8 min read

Bridging Zigbee, Z-Wave and BLE in one home gateway

A smart home is only as smart as its weakest protocol bridge. Notes from building YooTek's gateway that talks to three IoT stacks at once.

  • IoT
  • Zigbee
  • Z-Wave
  • BLE
  • MQTT

IoT vendors love their own protocols. Customers do not care. The home gateway sits in the middle and translates between Zigbee, Z-Wave, and BLE devices on one side, and the YooTek cloud on the other - over MQTT and WebSocket.

One device model, many radios

We modeled every device as a flat capability list - "switch", "dimmer", "thermostat", "sensor" - regardless of the radio it spoke. The radio layer was a plugin: load the right native module at runtime, expose the same capability API upward.

  • Zigbee bridge through Tuya / Legrand SDK modules.
  • Z-Wave handled by a small native daemon over serial.
  • BLE devices paired through Android-side scanning, gateway proxies the commands.

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