Just curious. Was the hardware device made to run core on it or is a repurposed device to run core that was available?
It’s based on a reference design from Amlogic and built with high quality components. To this Zigbee and Z-wave radios have been added.
If you have something good and stable, why would you reinvent the wheel?
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Great Thanks!!!
I have a lot of that pink CAT5 installed here, whole house uses C-Bus.
Guys what’s the maximum number of zigbee devices that can be connected? Also what’s the radio range like (is it better than our favourite?)
Are the Zigbee and Z-Wave radios built into the Core device? Or are they USB external radios?
Built in.
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Probably 200 devices directly connected if going by specs alone, but I wouldn’t recommend that. When it comes to number of devices in the mesh you won’t hit the limits as long as the mesh is well-built.
The range is good, this is a modern Zigbee chip capable of handling Zigbee 3.0, among other things.
Built-in.
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Thanks. Even at half that number its still >3x what HE can support directly.
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I just want to ask a bit more detail questions. Do you mean it support 200 sleepy end devices?
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By specs. yes it can support up to 200 sleepy end devices directly, but again we do not recommend doing so.
I have personally had over 70 sleepy end devices directly connected to CORE without any issues.
Really your environment, meaning things like neighbors, interfering devices, home size, construction material, will be what determines when, where and even if you need repeaters. Although really with any system you should always have a few well placed repeaters forming a solid mesh because it adds redundancy and helps eliminate the worry of interference issues down the line.
I finally added my repeaters to the network and built out a mesh because I got new neighbors a few weeks ago, and their microwave, hvac, or vacuum was causing intermittent communications issues between a couple outlying devices. A well placed repeater and the issue vanished.
This is why building a good mesh with repeaters will ALWAYS be the recommended procedure
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So just for clarification, you are talking about a limitation of up to 200 devices directly connected to the CORE without repeaters? If we do have repeaters, CORE handles whatever the Zigbee spec says for network size?
Hmmm, again with the multi negatives… Might this be another clue??? 
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This is nice. Thanks for the info.
Correct… Which in case you are curious here is a little breakdown on the zigbee protocol.
In Zigbee the “node address” is the physical device (the radio). Each physical device can contain up to 240 “logical” devices (endpoints). Endpoints consist of clusters, which provide device behavior. When you create a bindings, you are tell one “logical” device how to communicate with another “logical” device.
So technically you can have roughly 15 million (2^16 * 240) “logical” devices on a network. In practice, Zigbee networks that reach the 1000s of node ranges tend to hit technical limitations, but this comes down to the placements of the physical devices relative to each other.
Think of the Node address as the IP address, and the Endpoint as the Port value. You can have multiple “applications” running at a single physical address on different ports.
Question - in my experience xiaomi sensors simply fall off the network rather than rerouting to the next available repeater. I can only assume this is a hardware limitation however will core be better in this regard? I’ve got all my repeaters battery backed for this reason but even then a sensor still manages to drop off every now and then.
I have xiaomi lux sensors, vibration sensors, and an aqara cube (even more difficult than xiaomi in my experience). I have not had a single one drop off a single time
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This is partially due to firmware limitations in the Xiaomi/Aqara devices, there are however things the controller can do to make it less likely that the device would fall off when a repeater goes offline. CORE has special handling added to work as well as possibly can with Xiaomi/Aqara devices.
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@april.brandt How is going the campain?
I’m worrying the target could be too high to reach.
Hoping all the interested bakers spread the good news around… 
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The campaign seems to be stuck around 12%. I share your concern although they’ve confirmed they have alternative ways to fund if necessary, so it seems they are fully committed and it’s zero risk for backers anyway since we get the money back if it doesn’t get funded. I posted to a few YouTube channels. We can all do our part to help I guess.
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