Was looking for this one: ALPSTUGA air quality sensor: £25 (~$33 USD)
They need to cover all the categories too (single, multi-pole, dimmer, and maybe fan speed) so I know I won't end up with a hodge podge of brands and looks.
I'll keep holding out.
I do wish the new range would include blinds; the previous generation (FYRTUR) is out of production, and it doesn't seem like there's a replacement yet.
I don't care at all about Thread vs Zigbee (this press release doesn't actually say Thread), beyond the very basics in smart home things you want a computer involved and at that point the way it communicates stops being a big concern. I strongly recommend Home Assistant on a low spec mini pc, beats a Raspberry Pi in ~every metric for this use case.
I've been burned by trusting Matter to mean broad compatability; my Aqara lock doesn't indicate how the door was unlocked over Matter despite showing up in their app, and this is after having to buy their Zigbee bridge because it won't connect to Zigbee devices from other brands. Even with Matter, home automation still needs a geek.
The device type catalog is also somewhat limited, for example there’s no garage door device type.
* I can fully control them without the cloud on a non-internet connected network
* I can either pay for updates, or they have free updates for at least 12 years, ideally 15
If a hurricane or tornado strikes, or some dictator tries to tell me what I can and can't do, my devices need to remain under my command.
I keep hoping that Ikea would come up with something that can go over a switch to manually control it. Seems like it would be very much within Ikea's target market (renters). There are devices like this on Amazon but having used them in the past they are finicky at best.
How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?
I currently use Home Assistant but want to shift to something more “mass market” as I’m bored of being family tech support.
It’s so darn convenient to have MQTT in the picture for home automation and my #1 challenge in imagining a future world past my 400+ ZigBee devices is what replaces zigbee2mqtt and has a similar “owner experience”.
However, I also bought a 3 SCD41 sensors and ESP32 C3 Superminis from the most reputable sellers on AliExpress, that's been an abject failure. I wanted additional sensors in other rooms less at risk, and wanted to try using ESPHome and putting together my own soldered little devices. Got counterfeit sensors (no laser engraving on the side as Sensiron indicates is without reception the case in genuine parts) and either counterfeit or defective microcontrollers (cannot connect to wifi, even 2.4GHz WPA2, a common enough problem from my research with ). The spread from reputable sellers in NA was absolutely ridiculous and worse then buying premade pieces by a large margin.
All to say, as fun as DIY is, I'm grateful to have trustworthy products available affordably. I'll still block internet access and leave them on a dedicated IoT VLAN, but I can at least not worry it's going to incorrectly label the air quality for a child's bedroom. I'll probably pick up 3 of the CO2 sensors from IKEA, if reviews look good.
I'm thinking about buying a Dirigera hub instead, using that for the IKEA devices and using the Conbee stick only for non-IKEA products.
Does that work flawlessly when being controlled via HA or are there other issues to be expected?
edit: Maybe even ditch the Conbee stick after all, build some ESPHome devices as replacements (temperature/humidty - or wait for the IKEA version of that).
I was working on some Golang code, talking to them via the very open ConBee II ZigBee gateway. Great fun, and very fast once I got subscribe vs polling working. So now I get an SMS for door access, but kinda hopefully never for a water leak.
No interest in yet another 'standard', especially since Matter seems to mandate PKI device attestation. ZigBee just feels more open to me, and I have enough eWaste devices with expired certificates.
I have some Thread/Matter smart bulbs, and they work well, but Ikea joining in shows that it's finally ready for the mass market.
I had two Tradfri Smart Plugs - both broke down in the same way after the same time.
I had to swap 3 out of 9 GU10 lights due to flickering.
I'm also unhappy with how long their motion sensor takes to register, but that seems to be a problem with motions sensors in general.
Ikea's Tradfri line was very refreshing for being entirely configurable with the wireless remote it comes with. You can connect multiple bulbs to one remote, without ever tinkering with an app or a hub or Home Assistant, etc.
Crucially, old TRADFRI communicated from the remote control to the bulb directly, so Ikea couldn't burn me the way Philips did. I'm hoping the new KAJPLATS end up working the same way.
The submission you're commenting on seems to indicate some movement at least, from a very large company that seems to be moderately popular already because of built-in Zigbee support. So if anything, the tides are somewhat turning, but as always with standards, it takes a long time for end-user products to actually appear on the market.
i don't think it does, or that it's even trying to. the problem it's trying to solve isn't the power user who's already got a home assistant server running. matter/thread is for the person who buys cheap smart home products off amazon and ends up with a half-dozen poorly-translated proprietary apps on their phone to manage it all.
(I've done paid work on Matter so I'll avoid giving possibly-tainted opinions on any particular vendor's products.)
For example, I have more than a dozen Zigbee smart outlet around my home, and the IKEA one is the only one that ever hang and became uncontrollable, yet its also the only one without a physical button to toggle and without power monitoring.
One of IKEA's Zigbee remote controls I have also regularly drops connection and I have to remove its battery to reset it from time to time.
The ones I bought from AliExpress of unknown brands are, unfortunately, much cheaper, have more functionalities, and more reliable.
Perils of being early adopter, but kind of soured on the whole smart home concept unless you are wealthy enough to redo all of your home lighting and window treatments every 10 years. Apart from the effort, it creates yet more e-waste. I have 30+ year old manual window shades and lamps and they all still work.
But you can do it with just Home Assistant and a Thread radio: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread#turning-ho...
Personally, I pair my wifi and Thread matter devices to my Apple Home, as each Apple TV behaves as a redundant, ethernet connected gateway. I then do a secondary pairing to Home Assistant and Google Home. Local control and it works very well.
I was also somewhat impressed, and happy, that the Dirigera supported the older (I think discontinued now) Tradfri devices rather than making you replace things.
I replaced the hub with a Home Assistant Green with ZHA, and I haven't had any issues since.
So in my experience each of the devices seem fine over Zigbee, but the hub doesn't seem verify good.
It depends on your setup how easy it would be, but the Zigbee stick I use for controlling Ikea stuff also has firmware available for using it with Matter. There's a good chance whatever IoT solution you use can be hooked up to Matter.
Matter was made by the same guys that created Zigbee, proprietary vendor extensions are their bread and butter. Anything trickier than a contact sensor or motion detector, you should definitely research compatibility and definitely not update firmware once it works.
That's what Thread is for.
For iPhones (and iPads) just make sure you have OS version 18. They actually added Matter controller functionality in 16.1 but many people found it very flakey. Before 18 when I tried it I got my smart plug (Tapo TP15) connected and it worked fine for something like a day and then disappeared, and then I was never able to get it connected again. Even after telling the phone to forget the device and doing a factory reset on the plug I could not get the phone to see it. 18 on other hand has been fine.
For Android phones you need at least Android 8.1 and Google Play services 22.48.14 or later and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2 or later. That's what the net tells me--I do not have any direct experience with Android. The net is also telling me that you really want Android 12 because Matter support was not as stable in earlier versions.
From the name Matter controller and the diagrams in many explanations of how Matter works people tend to get the impression that a Matter controller is kind of like the WiFi router on your WiFi network: some dedicated device which you generally only have one of.
To see why that is not the case it is helpful to look at what a Matter controller actually does. (The general idea is right in what follows, but I'm sure I've botched some details that don't affect the overall points).
When you start out with a brand new Matter device and power it up the device will come up ready to be paired with its first controller. The controller and the device communicate using BLE, but the device will only talk to a controller that has a code that is hardwired into the device. That's what is in the QR code that is usually printed on the device or its packaging or a slip of paper in the package.
The controller and the device use that code to establish a secure communications channel over BLE. The controller gives the device WiFi connection information and gives it a certificate that can be used to verify that future communication over WiFi is with that controller. The device can actually remember several of these controller certificates, allow the device to work with several controllers.
Later, when things want to communicate with the device over WiFi it will only talk to things that can prove they have the private keys for a controller certificate the device has.
There is nothing that requires those private keys to only be in one place. If you set up a new Matter device using your iPad, for example, it will store the keys in Keychain and they will be shared with your other Apple devices, such as your iPhone and your Mac. Your iPhone and Mac can then authenticate to the device and it will accept commands from them. As far as the device is concerned they are all the controller that set it up.
There are some advantages of getting a controller that is not your phone/tablet/computer, such as a HomePod or Apple TV. Those support remote control through the cloud. If you just use your phone/tablet/computer you can only control the device locally.
Suppose that you set up the device first using an iPhone as the controller. Later you want to also be able to control it from an Android phone. What you do is go to Apple Home, find the device and open its settings, and somewhere in there there will be an option to put the device in pairing mode.
Select that and Home will generate a one-time pairing code, give that to the device, and put the device in pairing mode. It will also tell you that code.
You then go to your Android phone and go through its process for setting up a Matter device, except you use the code you got from Apple Home instead of the code that came with the device. The code that comes with the device is only used to set it up with the first controller (initially or after a factory reset).
That gets the certificate for your Android phone onto the device. It doesn't disturb the certificate from the iPhone so now the device will recognize both your Apple stuff and your Android phone as legit controllers.
Now suppose later you get an Amazon Echo and want to add the device. Echos can act as Matter controllers for the Alexa ecosystem. You can use any one of the existing controllers that are paired with the device (iPhone or Android phone, or anything those have shared their private key with like iPad or Mac) and have that put the device in pairing mode again and generate a one-time code, and then use the Alexa app on one of your phones to go through Amazon's Matter controller setup.
In summary:
1. Each ecosystem (Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Home Assistant, Samsung SmartThings, etc) that you want to use a Matter device with needs a Matter controller.
2. A Matter controller is not necessarily a separate piece of hardware. If you just want to control a Matter device from your phone you've probably already got everything you need.
For Matter devices that use Thread for wireless communication instead of WiFi, you are more likely to need hardware other than just phones and tablets. I think some newer iPhones do support Thread directly, but mine doesn't and I don't own any Thread devices so have not looked deeper.
Any evidence the Ikea sensor are actual CO2 censors and not just cheap "eCO2" sensors? Lots of the "CO2" censors our there are just cheap VOC censors with an calculation to estimate CO2.
Was it the dropping of support?
In particular note the bane of all smart homes: if you have to move the next owner won't have a clue what you did. In the worst case you have to hire an electrician (no DIY allowed since it isn't your house anymore) to rip that out so your house is livable. If you are using matter there is a chance they can start using your system in their own way. The more matter takes off the more likely this is. Also the more likely others will use it - perhaps you next house will have matter installed for you and so you can just automate it where you want to instead of rewiring the house first.
The ecosystem I've had the best luck with is, sadly, Tuya, aka Smart Life, aka giant Chinese conglomerate. Pretty much any small brand (or even some bigger brands) use Tuya to build because they have easy off-the-shelf solutions, and I have some confidence that they're large and entrenched enough that they won't randomly shut off their cloud services. But even if they do, enough reverse-engineering work has been put in that you can run most of your devices locally without a cloud connection. The cloud connection is pretty seamless and is the easiest thing I've had to configure in HA. Once you add a device in the Smart Life app you just reload the HA integration and there it is, ready to go. I actually get less latency toggling lights through HA than through the Smart Life app. I don't really worry about them knowing when my front door is shut or my living room lights are off, and I keep all that stuff on its own VLAN with no outgoing access to the rest of my network.
As I start dabbling with Zigbee and Thread and Matter and stuff, it seems like all of these other "open" "ecosystems" are really complicated and require buying a bunch of hardware I don't want and coordinating another network on another protocol, whereas the Wi-Fi stuff just usually works. It makes (some) sense for extremely low power devices that need to run for years on a battery, but lights and outlets don't really need to be Zigbee devices. BLE devices over an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy work surprisingly well too, and BLE is a less crummy technology than Bluetooth proper and seems to be low power enough for a lot of battery operated devices. I wish everything would just support MQTT because that seems like the most "universal" IoT protocol there is.
The problem with these wifi based sensors is that you eventually run out of IP addresses (yes you could get fancy with subnet setup but still). Another problem is that at some point you might want to swap routers -- I had to swap out a faulty Netgear router, and the re-set was a major PITA. For these reasons I've been moving to Zigbee.
That's why we have Thread. Wifi just isn't a very efficient protocol for using with deep sleep. The radio takes more power to run, the overhead of connecting is higher, and the device needs a full IP stack. Even with power save mode (if supported by client and AP), the radio is on for hundreds of milliseconds to send a message.
Thread has "sleepy end device" profile built-in where the hub will queue messages and expects the device to be in deep sleep most of the time. And since it doesn't have so much overhead, the radio only has to be on for tens of milliseconds.
can you use a dumb timer instead of a smart one? if you just want to set a schedule, there's no need for an internet connection there.
As for software updates, they can be updated, but these devices are so simple they can be reasonably bug free after a while - and security's not a concern (that much) since they don't really have internet access.
Some devices were known to have vulnearbilities where the attacker was physically present to get in radio contact with the device, but those are pretty rare and impossible to exploit en masse.
Regarding the electric switches, I was fond of bypass switches (where you can turn on/off by flipping any of the switches connected to a lamp) and made a lot of them in my apartments. Turned out not all of them were needed. I didn't need much control at home, e.g. I don't need to control the lighting above the kitchen desk when I'm not in front of it.
Wifi switches allow a lot of freedom in positioning and re-positioning them, but they escalate everything to the unreliable realm of IP/internet devices. I'd probably vote for a controller on a lamp, and switches not actually inerrupting 230V~, but be connected with a thin and flat 12V= bus, and just signalling, and hence be easy to put under wallpapers. (5V= would be hard to send further than 3 metres.)
Zigbee is great for communication instead of WiFi, but it’s just one part of the equation - it says nothing about the specific commands a device will respond to. You couldn’t pair a Philips remote with an IKEA lightbulb.
Matter attempts to fix it by actually defining the protocol that these devices use. It’s also fully local and open source, which is great. The actual transport layer can be WiFi, but it can also be Thread, which is a newer standard based off Zigbee, and AFAIK some Zigbee controllers can be reprogrammed to support it.
They don’t specify what transport layer they are using here, but considering the kind of devices they are showing (battery-powered remotes) it’s almost definitely Thread.
Matter is a communication protocol adopted by a lot of manufacturers but I think practically for the buyer the real benefit is that you no longer need a bucket of hubs for each of the device ecosystems one might use. It's more future proof so it makes sense IKEA would add support for it in their hardware including existing hubs I believe.
If I just want a smart switch that controls a smart light, can I do that without a hub? Can I use my phone to control that light/switch in a pinch? I'm not averse to spending $100 or whatever, but it's just more _stuff_ that I'd rather not think about.
[0] "Apple now lets you add Matter devices to Apple Home without a hub" https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24246581/ios18-matter-sma...
After spending time setting up Home Assistant, figuring out what I'd need to do to prevent a firmware update from hitting the bulbs, etc. I decided just to chalk the bulbs up to trash and sell them.
But your criticisms are strange. You have more than 254 devices connecting (which implies a complex setup) but can't increase the subnet size? Or does your router just have an absurdly small default DHCP range?
I also don't understand the swap your router problem, unless you're also using default SSIDs and not changing it. Configure the SSID and PSK to be the same as before and everything will just work.
That's enough for over 250 networked widgets to be concurrently connected with IPV4. That's a lot of widgets for one home.
If a person is getting into the realm of having a home with more than 250 networked widgets and addressing is becoming problematic in ways that are beyond their understanding and/or ability, then:
I might suggest that this is roughly equivalent to any other household thing that a homeowner doesn't fully understand (or that they don't want to understand), and that it would be completely fair to remind them that it is perfectly normal and acceptable to hire a qualified person or company to -- you know -- look into that for them.
(It's ok to hire a plumber, or a roofer, or a painter, or a cleaner, or any number of other professionals to help with making stuff work. It's also OK to hire someone to work on the network.)
Bandwidth and interference will likely be an issue far before ip scarcity.
I personally think relays are a much more reliable than solid state switches and are very unlikely to fail in a dangerous way, and fully interupt the circuit, but they do have a 'click' some people dislike, and have a lifetime of 100k-ish switches, so for an application where you keep switching rapidly (e.g. not light switches), this might be a problem.
Ikea used Thread and Zigbee which are not Wifi, they use a mesh network and don't suffer from saturation the way Wifi does, in fact adding more devices tends to make the network more reliable since devices can route around failing or congested nodes.
I've had good experience with them in practice, but do be mindful that they share the 2.4GHz band with Wifi so in an apt building, you might run into radio channel congestion.
Personally I use smart home stuff for controlling heating devices and a few other key items, I don't think it makes sense to make every light switch smart, but technically people have done so and it tends to work all right.
* Multiple VLANs - segregate devices - I usually have two for IoT devices: "THINGS" and "SEWER" * Router/firewall segregation * Home Assistant * etc
So my doorbell has a camera and I run the likes of Frigate or Zoneminder. It is PoE and also has a chime relay. It will still ring if the network goes down.
I am gradually migrating my home light switches to zwave ones. They will still work, regardless of HA being up.
My car (EV) and utility provider (Octopus) and so on are getting complicated and have multiple apps. I have a single Home Assistant box that manages all of that lot.
All of that is quite complicated. I'm an IT consultant with 30 years experience but a novice can go quite far already and it will get better.
This was exactly the nice thing about Zigbee (and Z-Wave). They're not IP networks, they basically just work with any hub, and have no way of phoning home at all. You can use them with Home Assistant or other open source tools or write your own stack if you wanted. The thing that really blows about the switch to matter, is that it is IP based, and it looks like vendors will have another opportunity to tie specific functionality to their own hubs (and probably find a way to exfiltrate telemetry). There really wasn't anything wrong with Zigbee or Z-wave that couldn't be fixed in incremental protocol revisions (IMHO), but they don't generate money the way WiFi devices collecting telemetry or hardware churn for the sake of hardware churn does.
Otherwise, I used floor lights in the past with WiFi switchable sockets before I switched to ZigBee. The WiFi ones wanted to dial home.
I like Shelly's doodads. They are easy to work with, you can flash their firmware with an alternative if you want (Tasamota is popular). They have a decent onboard scheduler and the only app you need is a web browser pointed at its IP address. They don't need internet access.
They're legally mandated in Norway, there's already a big section of them, some have Zigbee, like this one:
https://www.firefence.org/ https://www.bekkelund.net/2024/02/19/firefence-komfyrvakt/
I'm sure there are products in other markets too.
Pros: very inexpensive, and they look great. Cons: WiFi/ble only, they feel cheap, dimmers don't support a "transition" comment, so you cant dim over time easily.
It's just a personal tradeoff between features, downsides, and risks. Most people don't consider the risks at all (implicitly down-weighting that factor), and the value assigned to the features and downsides varies by person. I have some smart lights, because I like the convenience of those lights being on voice control. My TV is "smart" but doesn't get internet because I don't consider the risk of ads acceptable.
I usually take my smart devices with me when I move. It's a pretty expensive thing to leave behind for a new owner that probably won't use it anyways. If someone offered me extra to leave them I might and then I'd also leave a manual.
I've got a few locally-controlled wifi bulbs that I bought before seriously getting into home automation. They are Tuya white-label, I'm using the tuya-local integration. Since I can't do something like a zigbee `bind` they are fully network dependent, when they go I'll replace them with IKEA bulbs.
I agree Home Assistant still needs a nerd for setup and tinkering but the default dashboard is impressive and all of the functionality is outstanding.
Take a smart scale for example. Mine uses wifi and is in deep sleep almost all of the time. When you step on it, it weighs you, connects to wifi, and sends the measurement. This does fine on battery because it only gets used a few times a day max, and I think it may power up the radios to look for a software update once a day or something. If it had to power up the radios every 5 minutes though it wouldn't last a year on a charge.
Another example would be a water/flood sensor. The overwhelming majority of the time, it has nothing to report. Maybe once a day or so it should report the battery level and that it's still there. You can still get great battery life as long as you don't have to turn on the radio all the time, but Matter doesn't really let you do this, in my understanding, at least as of the current revision.
For Matter (regardless of network connectivity - WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread) this is part of the certification, the devices must be controllable locally and without internet connectivity at least for basic or core functions.
For Zigbee there's no such thing. Zigbee is the network protocol and the manufacturers usually implemented whatever communication protocol they wanted on top. This is why my Tado thermostats that communicate with the hub over Zigbee aren't compatible with any other hub and need the cloud connectivity even when integrated with HA [0][1].
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
1. Open/Close sensors, I would like to put sensors on my shed door and side gates that can tell me if they are open or closed. I will occassionally leave these open, or the kids may leave them open and would prefer they be closed each night. It's impossible for me to tell if they are closed at the moment without stepping outside.
2. Smart plugs. Being able to remotely operate / schedule plugs to shut off or on seems pretty nice. Outdoor lights being one usecase. Kids media area is another.
* The old Ikea Zigbee products will remain Zigbee. They will still require a Zigbee coordinator.
* The new products will be Matter-over-Thread. They require a Thread coordinator (or whatever the Thread equivalent is called).
* The existing Ikea hub has had a firmware upgrade that allows it to be simultaneously a Zigbee and Thread coordinator.
* The Ikea hub adds a Matter compatibility layer to the devices that don't natively support Matter.
I forked out for SmartWings blinds. You can choose between either Zigbee/Matter or Z-Wave (or neither I think?). The first-party hub is completely optional (that's important to look out for with Zigbee, which can be vendor-locked). They are drastically simpler than the average motorized blinds I've seen around, so I haven't had any of the mechanical failure nightmares. Pretty happy overall; though I haven't had them for 10 years.
I do use them as a kind of alarm clock as I am absolutely horrific with mornings, so manual ones wouldn't really work out for me.
Even if you're all in Ikea's ecosystem it will still mean whatever new devices you add from now on are a separate mesh network and can't use the existing zigbee products as repeaters. If the next thing you want to add is at the far end of your house from the hub, it won't have reception there with Matter until you put other new devices in between.
It can run over Wifi or Thread which provides the physical interface and networking support.
In contrast Zigbee defines both the application layer and the networking.
Of course you need Home Assistant set up for this, but if you are interested in these types of things, it will be very useful.
A pocket supercomputer, such as an iPhone, theoretically works just as well: It's a small computer-widget that sits on a network, right? It just happens to run on batteries and be carried around in your pocket.
It's just software at that point.
At the end of the day: The Matter devices are paired with the controller, similar to how Bluetooth devices are also typically paired with a main brain-box. (Except: A Matter device can be paired with many controllers concurrently, whereas a lot of Bluetooth devices can only be paired with one at a time.)
The network connection doesn't have to be permanent: It can work when controller is present on the network, and it will [perhaps obviously] cease to work when the controller is absent.
So if Apple has software that runs within an iPhone and acts as a Matter controller, then: Sure, no additional hardware is needed to wiggle the state of a Matter light bulb using your iPhone.
(And if that kind of local control is all you ever care about for controlling stuff then... that's good enough.)
But it was pretty stable once it was setup. Just occasional reboot on the rPI but I think that was my flakey SMS gateway code.
*Not to say that making ones own mobile clients is in anyway a for-everyone solution, but rather something only a picky mobile developer would do.
https://wizzdev.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-mat...
But, yes, Matter/Thread is more expensive than Zigbee by a lot.
Zigbee's issue was that anyone could make devices and modify the protocol. Tons of devices are vendor-locked to their first-party hub. Philips attempted to do this recently with a firmware update and only backed off due to extremely bad PR.
Z-Wave has the same "problem" as Matter. You have to pay the consortium per product. Part of that what that pays for is testing, and cross-vendor compatibility is mandatory. As a consumer you are guaranteed that a Z-Wave device will work with any hub (and therefore Home Assistant/completely locally). You own Z-Wave devices.
I ran both in my old home, and used Zigbee devices where possible (Z-Wave devices are often more expensive).
I would much rather have it the way of Z-Wave and Matter. It is the lesser of two evils.
You'll still end up being an amateur network engineer though.
Might give it a year or three and if they continue on that path I might have to reasses my "No smart devices in the house" "rule".
[1] https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/22-27349-001_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056
edit: Feel free to down but the evidence is in the products.
Zigbee will work with any other Zigbee device if it is properly implemented. not so with Thread.
So I'm using ESPHome for everything that could be wall powered and BTHome (with those same nrf52840 chips, you can buy boards for like $2 on Aliexpress) for everything that needs to run on battery.
In theory that's a win for Matter, but I'm a little concerned about the security and enshitification problems that might cause. I kinda like the idea that I can buy a cheap IoT lock off Temu and as long as my Zigbee gateway is secure there's very little chance of that decision coming back to bite me...
Seems like Home Assistant will launch a combo Zigbee/Thread dongle with great range in two weeks, might want to wait for that: https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1opak9w/new_...
It’s definitely complicated, but it’s a kind of usb-c of smart home - you only worry about the complex part when building a product. Just wish there was a better device reset/portability story.
There's 3~5 variants that require separate radios or at least separate frontends to work probably.
Notably these days are the ZigBee PHY and the FiRa PHY.
I just switched to LIR2032s rather than replacing devices.
Exactly the same but rechargeable, and there isn't a ton of waste.
What might be a problem is the number of devices that can be connected. For example someone who is using an Xfinity Gateway for their WiFi has a limit of 100 devices on each band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz) if they are on an XER10, XB10, or XB8. An XB7 can have 75 on each of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. An XB6 can have 30 on 2.4 GHz and 75 on 5 GHz.
How it works in Home Assistant afaik is that the border router is a piece of software running in docker that has access to the radio, and then HA talks to the thread devices via the virtual network interface of Docker.
It seems like something for bored, married people.
I started with similar needs and thought it would be frivolous, but now I find it genuinely useful and can’t believe I waited so long.
for companies that make some appliance and don't have aspirations to be a smart home platform, matter and thread gives them an easy way to get their device into the apple or google home apps and check off the "smart" box on the spec sheet without having to build an app and run servers.
Thread Border Router (for info).
Ikea recently did an update to enable the hub to be a Matter controller itself (over thread or Wifi). This means you can add matter devices to the Ikea hub directly and use the Ikea Home Smart app the control them instead of Apple Home or etc. You can add non-Ikea matter devices as well as Ikea matter devices (when they are released).
Considering you can't even set up Matter devices if you lost the enrollment QR code (and the manual enrollment code is printed on the back of those ceiling downlights), it's a very good idea to take them with you and avoid frustrating the future occupants :)
That said, it is entirely up to you how you would configure the system that the thread border router connects to. Thread specification uses local addresses for the thread devices, so in order for these devices to get access out into the public internet you would need to NAT the IPv6 pretty much (or the devices would have to be smart enough to figure out a globally routable IP address, via e.g. DHCP.) At the same time since it is all bog-standard IPv6, you also get full control with firewall rules, NAT/forwarding and such.
Overall you'd need either a very unusual device or a major misconfiguration off the beaten path to get thread devices talking on the public internet.
A lot of devices are not compliant though and either have extra functionality exposed in a nonstandard way, or don't comform to the standard well enough.
So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss regardless of vendor but more complex devices might not.
Eg, buttons so close to the heating element that they hurt to press
Buttons to turn it off that only work when dry, places near where a spill would go.
Buttons you have to press up to 10 times just to get it to a reasonable heat.
Why does induction also have to equal no buttons, and no dials?
I only have experience with the first three (besides Home Assistant) and they work very well (though the SmartThings hub is somewhat limited when it comes to device support, graphing, etc.).
I should also mention that with Homey Bridge the dashboard is in their cloud, though the Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are fully local. Homey Pro is also local. (I think they have a Homey Pro Mini in the US now.)
That works, I am doing the same. But the average consumers don't want to be bothered to run HA, they want things to work out of the box with minimal fuss setting up or operating. This usually meant having the Philips hub, the IKEA hub, the Samsung hub, etc.
> That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol
For sure not in the Zigbee protocol, which is standard. The differences are in the logical communication protocol, at application level. Each manufacturer wanted to fully control their product, with no alignment with other manufacturers, which made devices and hubs mostly incompatible outside of each ecosystem. This is what Matter is looking to fix. One controller coordinating over a standard protocol a bunch of IPv6 devices connected via WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.
And best part, Matter certification means the devices have to be able to operate locally. No more "cloud polling" [0] type integrations even for basic functions.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
And I'd vastly prefer it that Google (and Apple, and Amazon, and Home Assistant, and IKEA, and Philips, and...) all agree on the same protocol than each vendor making up its own thing.
I think the parent is referring more to manufacturers than end users.
It would suck to have fewer low-cost competitors, especially from China manufacturers.
Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer. You can use Thread without Matter, at which point you basically have Zigbee + IPv6, but the power comes with Matter since now every device is speaking the same language and can actually understand each other.
I'm sure someone will chime in and say you can setup a VLAN and restrict all Matter devices from the internet yada yada...
You don't have to do that with Z-Wave or ZigBee. And with ESPHome you know exactly what the device is doing because you have 100% control over it.
You don't need UL for smart home sensors.
We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.
(Historically, IP wins in these conundrums anyway. IP has been succession of grand successes for decades.
Resistance is futile. We should work to prepare for the eventually of what is to come.)
I think you're right that this won't work well with a CR2032, but if you're careful about using good voltage regulators it can last a long time on 4 AAs.
I was under the impression IPv6 doesn't need NAT. But you're saying they only get unique local addresses, so even with a border router bridging the connection back to my local Wi-Fi network they still can't send packets out to the internet? "They would have to ask DHCP for a real IP first" doesn't seem like much of a barrier.
But I have heard that old devices will be backwards compatible.
That's exactly the problem, there was no standard protocol for communication over Zigbee. Manufacturers could implement whatever they wanted on top of it and put the Zigbee logo, like you can put the WiFi logo on a device that speaks a proprietary protocol over WiFi. You bought into an ecosystem and if you wanted a device from outside of it, you needed another hub.
> So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss
Big "depends". Out of the box it will only work for the few manufacturers who look to be compatible with some other hubs. I tested a lot of basic devices (simple switches or bulbs) with various hubs with little success. Philips, IKEA, Bosch, Tuya, Aqara, Osram, etc. Couldn't discover, add, or control them properly without the corresponding hub.
If you use a device with HA and a Zigbee stick (router/coordinator) then you benefit from a lot of development done in the background to "translate" between all the variations. But that's not something non-techies want to deal with, it's too much of a hassle.
This is the problem that Matter solves. Certified devices must implement the standard communication protocol over the network of choice. So no matter the manufacturer, if I see a Matter logo I know the device will work with my Matter.
That said - placement needs some work. Or put the UI in a phone.
HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.
Technically Zigbee _also_ defines an API layer -- the Zigbee Cluster Library, or ZCL -- but that's more like an opt-in standard you _could_ implement, rather than any hard requirement. And no surprise, the Matter Cluster Library Specification, being authored by the same CSA that made ZCL, is eerily similar to ZCL...
But as I understand it, you're right that Matter is essentially "hey everyone, let's _actually_ standardize around a common application layer". It isn't technologically revolutionary (the building blocks have been around for more than a decade), but it's a better packaging of it all.
Source: My employer has been involved with Zigbee and other low-power network technologies for a long time.
>Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
>Google: Shares some credentials, but only within Google Account environment.
>Amazon: TBD, but their Matter implementation is mostly cloud-tied.
>Samsung: Hybrid approach; still best when used inside SmartThings, their 1.4 update seems to support for joining existing Thread networks. Still have to test it.
>So, even though Thread theoretically allows full interoperability, no vendor wants to be reduced to a dumb router in someone else’s ecosystem.
>there is no easy way to bridge Apple Thread to Home Assistant or Google Thread, even though it is theoretically supposed to be possible from a protocol standpoint.
>If you have such solutions, let me know, because I would take full advantage of it, and will regale your contributions in multiple home automation threads.
The protocols themselves might not but as a warning to people looking for “matter” as an indicator they can have local only control, apparently the matter spec doesn’t require local only setup. I bought Honeywell’s new matter thermostat and in order to get the QR code and keys you need to register it to a matter controller, you first have to download their app and connect the thermostat to their cloud, so that you can get the keys from the app. So the matter capabilities are still useless
You don't need UL if you are just selling directly via your own website. However, if you want to sell the product in stores, most stores are going to require it.
Yes you can, I did that with Ikea, Philips and Innr brands. No hub, not even Z2M involved. Yes, as you say they do need to agree on a "protocol" and AFAIK they are all following Philips lead on that, but they can totally work in a P2P fashion without any hub. They negotiate their own key, you just need to pair them with a very close distance (less than 5cm approx).
I can get some random, vendor I've never heard of, ZigBee sensor, and I know it won't do anything rogue on the internet because it doesn't have any way of getting to the internet.
Also, ZigBee is extremely power efficient compared to WiFi. With ZigBee, I don't mind putting a sensor in the crawlspace or somewhere a pain to get to. It won't need the batteries changed for a year or two anyway.
I know Matter can work over more efficient means than WiFi, but most of the cheaper devices I find are WiFi. A cheap ZigBee device is still ZigBee.
What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?
I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.
Nowadays, from what I've seen, Zigbee devices seem to be based on a couple of good ICs (and software stacks), which are inexpensive and battle tested.
Forgive me, I don't have a comprehensive experience on what standard does exactly what and how, but from what I've read Matter is a no go for homemade stuff - you need to go through cert for the hubs to talk to you.
As for out of the box support, I've read mixed things - I've heard that for many devices that are Matter compatible (more particularly, the Aqara W100 thermostat), you can't do everything the device supports via Matter that you can do with more proprietary APIs. Considering many of these companies are pushing their own ecosystems, they have an incentive to keep an advantage. Many people are already going for using Thread without Matter.
I feel like Matter is like the joke where they try to solve N competing standards by adding another one, and experience shows this isnt the way to go. The way to go is what Home Assistant does - they keep an open ecosystem with support for plugins, and for example for Zigbee, they implement the 'quirks' of your device into the framework, so you don't have to deal with it.
Despite this IKEAs devices have been mostly Zigbee and have worked very well with ZB2MQTT and Home Assistant out of the box. You are not required to buy a hub either that talks to some random server. Not to mention that IKEA had the to make sure the new smart hub the released was compatible with Matter/Thread meaning that customers are not forced to send more E-waste to landfill. The bar is pretty low these days and I feel IKEA exceeds that by a large margin
Maybe this will get better with time, but we're half a decade into the Matter era and the end-user experience is _worse_ than with ZigBee. In that sense, Matter has failed.
weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions
Homey Pro supports user apps written in HomeyScript (which is JavaScript-based). Similar to Home Assistant, there are many community extensions, including more obscure things. For instance, our not-very-common heat pump is also supported in Homey. A lot of vendors make Homey apps as well.
In a household with more than one person, everyone eventually has to use the home automation system and with Homey (but also SmartThings), I am sure my wife can also manage it when necessary if I'm on the go. Managing Home Assistant + the hardware is going to take a lot more effort to learn.
In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling, ...
And a person can also use a one-box solution running OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One is such a box) or Mikrotik's RouterOS (like their succinctly-named L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN).
But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is:
Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. As a part of setting them up, they're walked through a simple process of making an isolated network for those light bulbs.
And we don't seem to be anywhere near there yet.
(And that may seem like a far-reaching goal to some, but similar things have been accomplished in the past. A router from Wal-Mart used to boot up out of the box and Just Work -- while providing a completely unfettered, unencrypted networked named "linksys" or "NETGEAR" for anyone within earshot to participate in.
Things are longer that way these days. Consumer routers have tended to provide secure-by-default wireless networks for a rather long time now. At least in that one little, important aspect of consumer goods, sanity did eventually prevail.)
Thread doesn't have accessible IP address. It uses IPv6 and the ULA space which is non-routable.
IKEA is launching 21 new smart home products focusing on lighting, sensors, and control — all built to work with Matter, the universal smart home standard. The launch marks a significant step in making smart home technology easier to use, more affordable, and better adapted to real-life needs in the home.
With this launch, IKEA is rebuilding its smart home system and product range from the ground up. The new launch reflects years of development and testing in real homes, and a growing understanding of how people want smart products to work in their daily life.
The launch includes both new products and updates to existing categories – now built to work with Matter. This means IKEA smart products can connect with a wider range of devices and platforms, making it easier for customers to build a smart home across different brands.
“Until now, smart home technology hasn’t been easy enough to use for most people — or affordable enough for many to consider. This launch brings us closer to helping everyone feel ready and confident to get started,” says David Granath, Range Manager at IKEA of Sweden.
The updated range focuses on three key segments*, that provide the building blocks of a smart home that’s flexible, intuitive, and easy to expand over time.
_*_Full product list further down.
“This launch is about making the smart home experience better and broader. We're upgrading our most-appreciated products while also adding new ones to solve even more everyday challenges. Our focus has been on keeping things simple from setup to daily use, so it’s easy for people to start, use and grow a smart home,” says Stjepan Begic, Product Developer at IKEA of Sweden.
All Matter-enabled products need a smart home hub to work — like IKEA’s DIRIGERA hub, or one from another brand. As a certified Matter controller, DIRIGERA can also manage and control smart products from other manufacturers and brands. As a Matter Bridge, it ensures that existing IKEA non-Matter smart products will also be compatible with platforms using the Matter standard.
This launch is the first step in a broader update of the IKEA Home smart range. Looking ahead, IKEA will continue expanding into new product categories. The strategy is to launch products that are easier to use and more affordable than existing ones.
“Our goal is still the same as when we started exploring the smart home in 2012: to make it easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many. We start with understanding life at home, where we continuously watch, listen and learn what makes a difference in everyday life. We believe technology should serve a purpose, not exist for its own sake. With more than 900 million store visits each year, I think we’re in a good place to help more people discover the benefits of a smarter home,” says David Granath.
Sales start and local pricing may vary between markets. Please contact your local IKEA market for more information.
The KAJPLATS smart bulb range includes eleven variations, offering a mix of shapes, sizes, lumen levels, and styles — with options for both colour and white spectrum, as well as dimmable functionality. Compared to the previous TRÅDFRI range, each bulb has more functionality, including more colour options and broader light intensity spans.
Smart sensors: Five variations for motion, air quality, humidity and water leakage designed to support wellbeing and prevent damage.
Remote controls and plugs:
I am very pleased with my induction stove controls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhZjqhs8314
So easy to control and to clean, I shudder at the thought of cleaning fat splashed physical dials/buttons.
I much prefer that a $3 ZigBee temperature and humidity sensor definitely doesn't use WiFi rather than having to dig to see if a cheap a Matter sensor uses WiFi.
I also much prefer the prices of ZigBee.