TLDR: Matter with Philips Hue is unreliable. Matter doesn't support adaptive lighting on HomeKit (yet).
My two cents: thread and matter has the potential to be more reliable than WiFi. The biggest blocker is that thread border routers have no vendor interoperability (you have to buy a bridge for every vendor)
Zigbee and Thread are not the same thing. They use the same 802.15.4 radio. Zigbee does its own wireless mesh protocol, and then adds profiles on top. With home automation being most common. Thread uses 6LoWPAN to run IPv6 on 802.15.4. Thread adds a mesh network. Matter is the home automation protocol on top of that.
From an systems perspective they are the same thing. Zigbee vs. Thread is just transport. The protocol on top of that is what matters and the sole purpose (from my narrow perspective) of Thread+Matter was that this would be a team effort to allow different vendors to talk to eachother.
And with that in mind IPv6 feels like a decent choice.
If vendors don't respect that foundation then the whole point of Matter+Thread is just gone.
I literary couldn’t get any eve matter devices to work at all on my network. Turns out matter requires some ipv6 features my router doesn’t support and isn’t easily found out what routers do support it.
I’m a firm believer in matter and threads future, but ipv6s home network mess is going to hamper it for years imho.
IPv6 Unicast and Multicast. Seems like any consumer router made in the last decade should work as long as IPv6 is enabled. Consumer routers vary widely in software quality though.
Which my xfinity provided router does not. I spent weeks with support emails between xfinity and eve trying to get it sorted out before eve declared it an unsupported router and refunded me the purchase.
Right but isn’t this kind of illustrating the problem with the state of home automation in general? I mean, if you care enough to know about the features of your router, your also likely the kind of person who can pay attention to and work out all the kinks in home automation, and it’s fun and really cool when you get it working.
But for 90% of the population home automation is as elusive and as prohibitive as quality home espresso - expensive, delicate, and requires all the attention of a niche hobby. Not that most people aren't smart enough to figure it out, but for most people the juice isn’t with the squeeze. All the COTS hardware for easy implementation is a closed cul-de-sac and rather mediocre, and is condemned to be a neat gimmick that quickly loses its luster.
It’s certainly an issue with home automation, but I’d argue with home networking as well. Eero and Nest routers are popular for a reason, they hide the complexity and “just work”.
For the population that don't care about privacy, home automation is here. They go to Home Depot, buy a thing, go home, install the cloud connected app, connect it to Alexa/Siri/Google, and that's it. It's when you get additional requirements that it becomes much harder to set up.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing - what you get at Home Depot is mostly a gimmick or a convenient point solution like light bulbs. You’re right that privacy is compromised on those solutions, but I also don’t think it’s bringing the full and integrated experience of home automation to the consumer because the full solution is still too complicated, because of the need for deep hobby-level interest in its successful configuration and maintenance, right?
Late in responding to this but take for example using Home Assistant to integrate all the things - environmentals, presence, energy monitoring, switching, access, audio, video, etc. I don’t even think my house is all that sophisticated compared to some, but there’s no way an off the shelf plug-n-play solution delivers this today. I know way more about zigbee, Insteon, Zwave, tasmota, protocol border routers, gateways, dual band repeaters, bad and good vendors, leading vs trailing edge dimming and component value than I want to, and that’s just to get things talking effectively and reliably. Then there’s the automation build out - rules, data storage, state, events, triggers, oh my! And that’s atop an existing knowledge for managing vlans, WiFi, and the rest of the network stack. There’s also an assumption of comfort with residential wiring, of course. It requires hobby-level commitment from someone in house who becomes the SME. I enjoy it to an extent, though I wish it was easier, and it’s just not when I step back and take stock of all the obscure knowledge it takes. It’s kind of hilarious.
In my personal experience, Phillips Hue is unreliable in general. I just replaced every Hue bulb in my home because one in four had either turned inti a flickering haunted house prop or failed entirely.
In my experience they have been the most rock solid piece of all the smarthome tech for a decade for me in multiple homes and apartments. I still have and use the original bulbs that came in my first starter kit.
For me, Phillips Hue has been the only bulb to have NOT done this, despite being the oldest. But the cheaper bulbs I've bought on Amazon have all started flickering or just out right failed completely. This has really enforced the "buy cheap buy twice" idea in my mind.
It's possible you've been scammed. I suspect there's a big market in selling knock off Hue bulbs because they can mark up the price so much more.
I'm still unclear on why the need for a border router exists at all. My zigbee devices work just fine without access to my local network or the Internet, but the same devices using matter/thread claim to need a border router? What are they doing differently than my zigbee stuff?
The protocol and network are open, but it’s encrypted and as far as I can tell none of the major vendors allow you to export or import the keys you would need to add a bridge from a competing platform.
Isn't that what the Matter QR codes are for? Which I thought were mandatory for all Matter products?
I guess a loophole might be to make the border router matter compatible but none of the actual devices. At which point you really shouldn't be buying them anyway.
Zigbee relies solely on noone being able to MITM the pairing process, where the security lies in the short window of opportunity and short range.
But Matter (and thus the Thread devices we talk about here) has an out of band mechanism for sending keys, since it requires QR + BLE.
I guess your point is that you typically can't form a Thread mesh between different border routers of different vendors. Which is unfortunate, but solvable. Don't buy/use border routers from such vendors. Because that problem is not the same as not being able to use a device from vendor X on a non-X border router.
For Zigbee, you need a hub for apps to work because the Zigbee protocol is its own thing. If you are lucky, it is Home Assistant and can use that on local network. If you aren't using HA, then it is custom hub that talks over the Internet to just that app.
Big advantage of Matter/Thread is that don't need a hub with its software. It is IP-based protocol. On Wifi or Bluetooth, your phone talks directly to the devices. On Thread, you need a gateway to translate from Wifi to Thread. Your phone only needs to know about Matter.
I don't think Matter devices talk over the Internet, I think they use non-routable IPv6 addresses. You can use HA to control over Internet but that uses the HA app. I don't know what other apps do, probably the same custom thing as with Zigbee.
Matter works similarly to HomeKit, with direct access to devices, but Matter adds the low-power Thread. It is also standardized so that could have generic Matter app instead of every device being its own app. And can add support to HA instead of custom Wifi and Bluetooth devices.
That makes a lot more sense if it's supposed to talk directly to my phone. Would I still need a router if I already have HomeAssistant with a thread usb module? I don't really care about bypassing HA, I'm fine with keeping the hub.
If using Thread from HA server, then it would work the similar to Zigbee (and they use the same radio). I think HA can do Matter over Wifi and Bluetooth.
Some Google Home devices can be Thread hub, and Google Home can do Matter directly. iOS 16 has Matter support but not sure what that means. That may be the advantage that don't need to download app for each device but will be builtin to OS.
The problem is the investors. They love recurring revenue. Hence data mining apps and closed ecosystems with subscription fees. And bait and switch tactics like Hue where the conditions deteriorate over time (like needing an account now so they can track you better)
Companies don't really want to give us freedom of choice. They just want to take our money. Ideally through subscriptions so they have to do almost nothing for it but can cash in easily.
So all the "special sauce" doesn't have a technical reason but am economical one.
It's true that the trend in the industry definitely goes towards subscriptions and closed eco systems.
We at AirGradient see that very well that more and more companies force their users into the cloud and some monitors even refuse to show current air quality when not registered to the cloud. Imagine you would need to register your fever thermometer with an app in the cloud before you could measure your temperature...
Part of the problem is not only the investors in Matter but also VC funded smart home equipment manufacturers that are pressured to go down the recurring revenue business model.
At AirGradient [1] we want to demonstrate a counter example. Our fully certified air quality monitors are open source hardware and thus we provide the firmware code and they can be easily re-flashed with whatever software you like to use. With this openness a great community has emerged that maintains integrations to various systems like Home Assistant via ESPHome.
Thanks for trying a more customer-friendly approach!
I don't have an immediate need for one of these, but do you have any plans to expand to Europe or work with a local distributor? Inflated shipping cost & time, VAT & customs duties (+additional processing time) and a cumbersome return process if anything goes wrong, makes for a less than ideal shopping experience.
At the moment we still have a lot of dynamics in the product, eg frequent firmware updates on the shipped units and this is why we currently prefer to ship directly.
Once things are more settled down we will look for fulfillment centers in Europe and the US.
Hey, I run a small fulfillment company in Germany and would love to help shipping your products. In fact, I just wanted to order your indoor kit yesterday but, as others have said, it's not that straight-forward ordering from the US. Drop me a note at can@getravioli.de and let's see if we can make it work, including the complexity with the firmware updates and so on.
To provide a counter point here, I jumped through all these hoops and happily run an AirGradient sensor here in Germany. While delivery took a while, everything went well in the end.
Thanks to Achim for all your awesome work, by the way.
At the moment you need to flash ESPHome onto it (can be done easily via the browser) and then there is a well maintained ESPHome configuration script available.
I literally just purchased your fully assembled kit a few days ago specifically because all the parts are open source and easy to hack. Right now I’m running Amazon air quality monitors with a homebridge plugin I had to patch myself because Amazon changed their API which broke everything.
This is exactly the kind of product worth supporting. It's Christmas Day, so won't be buying today, but I've added this to the list of items for my Home Assistant.
I think I'd seen your product before on HN. It looks nice but like the others say, I'm in Europe so it's a no go for now. Will keep an eye on it though for when you decide to expand!
Looks perfect for me with one show stopper: no Home Kit support. I love the idea of Home Assistant but do not have the free time to pick up another service to support in our house.
Massive respect to that HA support. I’ve started running HA and it amazes me what is available on some cloud products once you remove the proprietary cloud from them. I used to be a Google home or bust, slowly I’ve been going the cloud agnostic route. Any Android device should work with Google home (for the wife) and both HomeKit + Home Assistant. I say HomeKit and Home Assistant because I really like Apple ease of use and the ability for home assistant to pipe other compatible sensors directly into HomeKit for example, ecobees sensors provide more sensor data via home assistant than they do in their regular app and in HomeKit. Via Home Assistant I can add this extra sensor data directly into HomeKit.
I would counter this idea its all corporations fault with "the general public doesn't want to rotate a tire, let alone grow a potato."
We socially infantilized each other. Technology plays a huge role in that.
Voices of the past warned that extreme division of labor would result in humans that are lazier, stupider than the dumbest animal. People sit online screeching about the slightest social faux pas, do nothing about intentional destabilization of education, healthcare, and infrastructure by political parties.
We complain that every last mile problem, every edge case we encounter, was not solved already by Big Tech. Never occurs to us to solve them ourselves.
I grew up being taught how to rebuild cars from the frame up, fix houses for people in need struggling in Midwest winters, was mentored in physics, chemistry by college age aunts and uncles, had a grandfather who retired after decades of designing computers for IBM teach me analog circuit designs/implementations, and helped farmers birth/raise livestock, got a couple uni degrees a while back. I'm barely 40.
Meanwhile my office worker colleagues waste time and real resources driving for an oil change. They demand others solve their survival problems for them. Friends struggling in this economy have started chanting "If I'm just going to berated for not working 7 days/week for a rich person, may as well quit and work 7 days/week growing my own food, fixing my home."
Fingers crossed the fiat hallucination Boomers force us into serving is about to vanish with them. Physics does not put an obligation on the future to propagate their rhetoric.
The oil change thing always baffled the shit out of me.
I don’t drive, as it’s been largely both unnecessary and impractical with where I’ve lived in the past decade, but I know how to check and change the oil in a car, among other basic vehicle maintenance tasks. It’s not hard or time consuming.
I live in city and i do not have space to do it. I do not think draing oil is legal on city center. Or wise for that matter. So i drive for oil change, even though i know how to so it
It's a dirty job and usually comes almost free with a service call, including the disposal of the used oil which you have to drive for either way, to bring it somewhere where it may be disposed even if you do it yourself.
When I owned cars I often used to fix issues myself (as I used to drive old ones I've replaced entire window mechanisms and wiring harnesses) but not the oil changes. It's just not worth it. And it's so much easier with a full hoist, I only had portable jack.
Ah, I guess if it’s free with regular service calls that makes sense as to why one would outsource the task.
As for disposal: in a fair few places I’ve lived the city has had regular free pickups or drop off locations for “hazardous” domestic wastes such as oil, car batteries, etc.
I think people are, generally, smarter and more capable than ever.
Social media just highlights the dumdums.
IMO the real issue is lack of instilling a sense of agency at a young age.
You were taught how to build cars from a young age. I’m sure you were encouraged to try things yourself along the way. You learned that your actions have a direct impact on the world and that you have the ability to adjust your actions to adjust the impact.
(At least in the US) Education is so retention and information focused that we don’t teach _how_ to apply that information.
Because of this we grow up looking to others for how to do anything, even if we have the know how.
It’s usually not until later in life when people realize their actions can truly have an impact when applied correctly
> Fingers crossed the fiat hallucination Boomers force us into serving is about to vanish with them. Physics does not put an obligation on the future to propagate their rhetoric.
You could have used a relative educated in economics. Remember that just because you’re an expert in one field doesn’t make you one in another.
Only if you buy another gateway that works with that other app. Like many enthusiasts do, yes. Like home assistant. But it's not an option for the average Joe.
In many cases non-recurring revenue is barely even acknowledged. It doesn’t matter. Recurring revenue is the only meaningful form from a valuation perspective.
I am using z-wave as well. It has been rock solid, and using the z-wave association capability I don’t even need the hub (using Hubitat) unless I want to do more complex automations. The only downside is the ecosystem has fewer options (but have been high quality IMO) and the cost is higher than the ubiquitous WiFi smart home devices that require their own apps and internet connection.
FWIW, Gardena sells "dumb" irrigation valves that run on 24V. It's just a normally-closed solenoid valve IIUC, with proper fittings etc. Controlling these with a 24V power supply and a Z-wave relay should be easy?
I am also invested into Z-Wave with about 50 devices. It works well, doesn't require an Internet connection, degrades gracefully if the hub is unavailable (or indeed any RF) and Z-Wave JS UI is good enough for self-hosting and bridging to MQTT for full integration with anything else I want.
The protocol is also excellent for battery powered devices in terms of super low power consumption: depending on the device's needs, the protocol allows for the device radio to be completely off for hours at a time. For example, I have a couple of key fob controllers that we use daily but we haven't replaced the batteries in them for years.
My only fear is that "consumerist" IoT platforms that change every few years will usurp it and new Z-Wave devices will become unavailable.
I did the research about a year ago and this wasn't an issue that came up.
It really just seems to come down to your local market. Zigbee seemed to have more compatible devices in the US vs zwave so I went with zigbee. I only have about fifteen devices, mixed between a few manufacturers, but it's been rock solid after I switched from my initial conbee to a sonoff dongle.
I just don't trust smart home stuff, it all seems like a big data collection nightmare at best, at worst you could have criminals and government nannies both spying on you 24/7. I still use incandescent lights though too.
Home Assistant is FOSS software that just runs on a Linux box, its functionality/integrations all come from FOSS plugins that you can write and/or modify yourself.
HomeAssistant is FOSS and it has an incredible number of integrations, it's extremely capable though not as user-friendly as commercial offerings when it comes to setting it up, which is to be expected.
In similar vein ESPHome and Tasmota are 2 independent FOSS projects that can replace proprietary firmware on many commercial smart devices based on ESP32.
Some WiFi-based smart devices like those made by Shelly work without internet access and integrate with HA via local HTTP API.
Fully local smart home is possible, but you'll need to research what you're buying - as a general rule, you should avoid WiFi-based smart devices unless they offer a local API. Everything else (ZigBee, Z-Wave) should work offline without proprietary hubs, though I'm sure there are exceptions.
And the LibreTiny version of ESPHome supports the common WiFi microcontrollers that have been “replacing” the ESP range, that have been popping up in devices made by Tuya and the like such as
But yeah, using both Tasmota and ESPHome I’ve moved all (bar one) of my “WiFi Only” devices to being fully local devices.
(The exception being my thermostat for my heating, that uses a tuya-mcu and a LCD driver IC so I don’t really want to reflash that and faff with the tuya-mcu this side of winter, and I’m planning to replace it with a OpenTherm controller next year anyway. In the meantime I’m using a local tuya integration in HA to just send it commands directly)
Thanks, I have to admit I just wrote the whole thing off from the get-go. But then again I've been around long enough to see things like X10 take off and then get abandoned. Like IBM's Home Director and other products in that space, which from where I sit, is the exact same market as smart homes but without the mobile focus.
It's good to see that people are able to hack this stuff and make it less reliant on the companies. Heck they're probably selling some of it at a loss and hoping for recurring revenue from usage stats and other spying.
CloudFree [1] specifically sells HomeAssistant compatible devices that you flash with your own ESPHome or Tasmoto firmware, giving you total control. The prices are decent too (no affiliation, just a happy customer) but you can pay a little extra to have them flash it for you.
I recently set up Home Assistant and a bunch of ESPHome-based sensor devices. It was pretty easy (for someone who's technical enough to write YAML, use SSH, and do some basic soldering) and now I have a "smart home" which is totally bullshit-free and cost like $80 all-in. It was a fun like weekend project I can recommend it!
That’s one of the things Matter is supposed to help with - part of the spec is that all devices need to have a local-only / no-cloud / no proprietary app option
I really like being able to have different light moods throughout the day, in different lamps around the room, instead of a single lamp in the ceiling. This would be very tricky to do with dimmable switches.
If I want a light to be on, I turn it on. I don't go much for mood lighting, I have lamps and overhead lights and depending on the level of illumination I want or need at the time, one, some, or all might be powered up. But I've never thought of getting up from my ass groove on the couch and going over and operating a switch is a huge deal. And I'm pretty lazy.
This. I tried IKEA’s stuff and it drove me bonkers. We’ve had light switches for over 100 years. Why would I want to replace a perfectly good light switch with flaky buttons and smart bulbs that need to be repaired every month?
But I still wanted to use Home Assistant to control lights. The solution? Smart light _switches_ and wall plugs.
I went with Lutron Caseta wall switches and plug-in dimmers. (Expensive at $60/switch.) Lutron has been doing commercial automation for a very long time and it shows.
1. They work without any automation. Most dimmable LEDs will work.
2. The remotes connect directly to the switches and don’t need a hub.
3. The pro hub model connects to home assistant. You can use unpaired remotes as switches. (Using the correct blueprints.)
I’ve had this set up for over a year and I’ve yet to replace a battery on the many dozens of remotes I have. And I’ve never had a problem with the switch not working.
I get to do all the tinkering I want without breaking my house. :)
Note: I do have some Phillips Hue bulbs for color but those are in lamps separate from overhead lighting.
For sure. Don’t use it. But some of us find it enjoyable to write automation scripts and get our homes behaving exactly how we want. Might I suggest you refrain from shitting on some one else’s hobby just because it’s not for you? I’m sure building a ship in a bottle “wastes” lots of time too.
An ESP32 (or 8266 honestly in most scenarios) and ESPHome/WLED/anything that supports MQTT will do the job reliably and without concerns of data collection/spying. Isolate their network and open a one way firewall port for the proxy/dashboard you want to use. For most devices, soldering is minimal and simple. You spend a little more time on initial setup, but all those concerns slip away.
I understand how compelling the marketing hype seems at first, but a quick investigation reveals this to be yet another mafia shakedown and effort to lock down and prevent any meaningful competition.
They have a 16-bit Vendor ID. That's 65,535 vendors supported. Globally. Ever. One must pay the CSA ([0] $2,500 per PRODUCT or $7,000 per YEAR) for one of these artificially scarce identifiers.
In order to download specs, you're expected to accept TOS, authenticate and then you're emailed a (presumably authenticated) link to the PDF [1].
You need to wait for the consortium to define every single application layer detail for each and every type of thing [2].
Of course, the decision makers are unable to make high quality decisions since their own businesses depend on trapping customers in their respective walled gardens. The goal is to prevent any small or medium sized businesses from competing with the small handful of multinational megacorps.
From what I can tell, it's all of the worst parts of USB, without HID and Serial to fall back on for things they didn't think to define.
> They have a 16-bit Vendor ID. That's 65,535 vendors supported. Globally. Ever. One must pay the CSA ([0] $2,500 per PRODUCT or $7,000 per YEAR) for one of these artificially scarce identifiers.
I didn't know any of this. I pay attention to IoT (and run a modest Home Assistant setup in my home.) Had I known about these constraints, I would have written off Matter from the beginning.
Coming from software and making the move to hardware has been incredibly eye-opening.
As soon as you need to instantiate something with atoms, the cycle-times and overall difficulty increases exponentially. Just when you think you've got something, all these despicable gatekeepers shove their hands in your pockets.
There are lots of reasons we can't have small batch, niche electronic products, and these license fees combined with even worse regulatory costs require enormous sales volumes to amortize.
It's really concerning to see the same rent-seeking values making such strong headway in the software space over the past 5-10 years too.
The USB-IF also artificially limits the vendor address space, which gives them the ability to charge exorbitant fees before anyone can deploy a device without conflicts.
I haven't tried to build and deploy a PCI device yet, but given your point, I assume the same game is being played.
At least with these 2 technologies, they can lean on being around for some decades. Bits were quite a lot more expensive 20+ years ago.
I think that the vendor ID limitation is less of a hurdle, realistically, than it’s made out to be, especially in the short term. Simple cert costs and loss of captured markets/lack of demand are the bigger impediments. But I don’t think the obituary needs to be written on matter yet.
The problem is that such a small address space, combined with such large fees, makes it impossible for almost all individuals (and tiny organizations) to participate on equal footing with megacorps.
Another measly byte (or two) could have made it possible for fees to be reduced down the road, but as-is, there is an artificial barrier to popular access.
I was so excited about Matter at first, but now it seems like nobody really cares.
WiFi has gotten way more reliable, and devices with open local APIs are more common now. Bluetooth is even starting to be used occasionally. YoLink's LoRa based hardware is still better than anything else even slightly affordable, even though it's still totally a closed cloud based platform.
What an odd choice for them to hide the download link behind a verified email address and coerce a TOS accept that is presumably linked, then make the documents available via search links.
I assumed my link in my email was fingerprinted as there are some odd characters encoded into the URL.
As it turns out, it matched the search result link.
I honestly feel like smart homes are getting worse each year for me. Now even Hue is an unreliable and unnecessarily frustrating experience. The only actual improvement in my setup has been that the IKEA Dirigera hub is now a solid improvement but some Hue stuff doesn’t work with it.
On the other hand some manufacturers are now actively fighting home assistant and the matter switch is non existent. A total zero number of devices in my home run over matter, something that I didn’t expect given the huge amount of excitement early on.
It feels like rather than everything slowly converging I now run two hubs still, custom smart home apps, a largely unreliable and useless home assistant next to some things with HomeKit.
I really can’t stand it and I’m incredibly frustrated by it.
That’s why I originally replaced the hub. But it’s a much better hub on its own so I’m not too mad. I can’t find matter devices independently that I want to use and are actually working properly.
The famous example at the moment is the family of MyQ garage doors (Chamberlain, Lift Master etc.). Integrations that break after an upgrade and don’t get fixed for longer than I can deal with are more common.
> If Matter can succeed in convincing companies to compete on the merits of their devices—not the incidental revenue that comes from being a single-system device provider, or phone app marketing...
...then in a few years, people won't even notice that they're simply scanning a code on their devices and adding them to whatever home control system they wish.
The sentence you (partially) quote starts with "if" and ends with "wish". Cough.
After trying to go in hard with IoT, I now just rely on Apple Home Kit to unify everything for me. It’s good enough except for the terrible interface to set lights on and off, it’s literally the worst I’ve ever seen.
Same here, I also don’t understand why the home app is rather lacking. The light switches in the control center are okay, but that quickly becomes too full. I mostly use voice commands to manage my lights and third party apps like the one from Eve for other accessories.
Is it though? The lack of standardisation on the layer above means that compatibility between vendors is iffy at best. Even zigbee2mqtt unfortunately has its inconsistencies.
I'm reserving my interest in smart home tech for when it's a clear win in terms of energy efficiency. Very recently I compared my current home lighting costs with a fully smart-equipped setup, and it basically just balanced out. I was surprised, because I calculated a best case scenario where the lights could basically always be off when not in use, compared to my current patterns where honestly I'm pretty lazy and leave all them on almost all day. The industry/general consumer priorities are pretty frustrating.
Yeah, that's what I was factoring. For my home, the 24/7 power consumption from a handful of switches + some kind of hub just balanced out the potential savings from having the same bulbs off more often.
I guess you have plenty of lights that you don’t leave on “all the time” such as lights in toilets that typically run at low duty cycles (I guess the light in my toilet is on for less than ten minutes a day, and only in winter, for example)
For such lights, the permanent power usage of the controller can be much larger than that of the light, even if you accidentally leave it on way longer than needed now and then.
So, that’s about 10Wh a day. If you use that to control a 10W light, you’d have to decrease its ‘on’ time by a hour a day to come out positive in energy usage. I have many lights that aren’t even on that long each day.
I think home automation of lighting fixtures as a way to conserve energy made way more sense before LEDs became common.
From those that are privacy conscious matter also has an issue that seems largely underreported.
You can't choose which device on the network is the controller when setting up a new device to a network.
For instance if you have a home assistant blue it might choose your Amazon echo to initiate the network. Therefore you have multiple networks running which may not respect your privacy or choice.
The first time I was reading about matter, I was also watching the last season of The Expanse (a hard sci-fi series). In that show, technology mostly just happens in the background, despite being central to the plot often.
I think that is because the characters tend to have a very nonchalant way of using it: Whatever terminal is nearest can be used to interact with stuff in vicinity. There are no boundaries between devices, services, or the like; everything communicates with everything else, over any channel available, without further thinking.
If we ever get past showing off how the ceiling bulb can do red light, maybe we could start having a protocol for automatic device capability negotiation/discovery?
Yes, well, mostly: I’d expect you’d have to add new things to your network with some level of confirmation once–if anything, proper auth should be baked in.
But after that, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have separate devices anymore, but a single digital identity across all of them, with an interface to control unique capabilities of each of them?
For a banal example - there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to set a timer on our phone, and check it on a computer, or kitchen counter display. On the other hand, I can’t check on the progress of my vacuum robot from my laptop, because the vendor only offers a mobile app. I can’t pull the stats from my car at all, I can’t check a hard drive without plugging it into something compatible, I can’t easily send a big file to someone nearby. Technology should allow us to do all that.
Devices should promote their capabilities and offer a standard interface to control them, and simultaneously be able to display controls for the interface of other devices, depending on available means of input. Done well, this can actually be zero config.
It comes closest, although my „vision“ is bigger; I hope it will become feasible to let any device communicate with any other, even classes of devices or sensors that don’t even exist yet.
There is zero incentive to create or support such a thing. No recurring revenue or lock in opportunities. It could only happen if it were mandated.
Open source could do it in theory, but only for nerds. Open source can’t create mass adoptable products because making technology easy to use is fabulously expensive and difficult.
So if the market can't achieve this, regulate. We live in a world built on standards, but industries like IoT have developed since the US went batshit and decided that sort of thing amounts to impurifying precious bodily fluids. Maybe the EU will do something to sort it out.
Maybe you are forgetting software industry is pretty inmature. Thats why we struggle with standards, quality, hell even job description (engineer is in certain countries regulated job name). Not mentioning interoperabilty, long term support (ics/scada anyone) or security. This is still wild wild west in 1850+. Civilization is pushing but…
Some things shouldn’t depend on market incentive. This is a fundamental problem with technology, which by and large is unaware of any other technology than itself. This makes it burdensome to use several devices together in a useful manner. Going forward, I don’t think anyone would dispute there’s going to be more tech around. Maybe it’s time for something truly progressive, and mandate this?
I don’t think the market alone would create a unified rail or telephone network. Yet that has brought immense benefits for society at large, and vendors still manage to capitalise on top of the plumbing.
if you have an account online somewhere you can log in from any device. the device itself is merely a machine to run the code downloaded from your online account. you could do everything though that account and treat the device like a dumb terminal.
any specific device that provides special functions, like your car, could also connect to that account and upload its data there, so you can access it from anywhere else.
AFAIK, the purposes of the web was sharing information, building a corpus of knowledge by everyone interacting with each other, and it was so for sometime until the advent of the algorithms and walled gardens. I started on the web a bit late, and it was because I wanted to learn how to draw and play the guitar. There was a lot of weird sites build on Wordpress sharing tutorials and multiple forums with people interacting just like this one. Soon after FB came and almost everyone switches to pages and groups, and some years after you can barely find anything on google.
I wouldn't mind connected services, but when my data is held hostage and the one in control is a faceless company, it does not feel like technology anymore, something that would help you accomplish your task better. Take my smart tv, I would be glad to connect it to my network and not bother with the apple tv when I want to play a movie, but the last time I tried, it tried to forcefully upgrade itself and wouldn't let me skip some onboarding screen that tried to get me to create an account. I had to unplug it. Or when some headphones or mouse manufacturers want me to use bloated proprietary apps just to configure them.
While what you describe is technically feasible, it never feel like this as tech companies always start a conflict with their (paying) users by taking their data hostage, enshitifying their platforms, and destroying any attempt of integration.
you are absolutely right. what i describe is what i'd wish we had, and what i think the web would have evolved into if walled gardens hadn't happened. it is still possible though as long we are able to retain the ability to host our own services and if we are working on making that easier for everyone.
i don't know if my idea how to do this is to simple, but essentially, i think what is needed is the ability to connect all my devices into a virtual network, where some of these devices act as connection portals to allow me to interact with them from any other device. i think the hardest part is the security of these remote devices so they don't leak my credentials to others using the same device later.
The easiest way to achieve this would be to document the protocols and let hackers and power uses take over building interfaces. The company can continue support their own apps and people who want more integration can create their own thing as they usually want specific solutions. But we are headed the other way, with more locked down platform.
The only way this would ever work is if we have a body with authority that defines/approves standards (I guess with industry input), and devices that claim to do X must be certified, and certification must be clear during purchase. Customers can then choose to only buy certified devices. I’m very willing to sacrifice some flashy feature for interoperability.
And this should be across domains. A data or diagnostics scanner for example should be able to retrieve data from my car, from my fridge and from my hear rate monitor.
173 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadMy two cents: thread and matter has the potential to be more reliable than WiFi. The biggest blocker is that thread border routers have no vendor interoperability (you have to buy a bridge for every vendor)
Why? They all work ~fine on zigbee which is pretty much the exact same thing just with even less oversight.
I haven't bought into matter/thread because I haven't found a single device I want yet.
And with that in mind IPv6 feels like a decent choice.
If vendors don't respect that foundation then the whole point of Matter+Thread is just gone.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/cpbu9w/ikea_tradfri_bu...
There certainly are issues with the zigbee devices, but that is not it.
I’m a firm believer in matter and threads future, but ipv6s home network mess is going to hamper it for years imho.
ICMPv6 (type 133) Router Solicitation (RS)
ICMPv6 (type 134) Routing Advertisement (RA)
Which my xfinity provided router does not. I spent weeks with support emails between xfinity and eve trying to get it sorted out before eve declared it an unsupported router and refunded me the purchase.
But for 90% of the population home automation is as elusive and as prohibitive as quality home espresso - expensive, delicate, and requires all the attention of a niche hobby. Not that most people aren't smart enough to figure it out, but for most people the juice isn’t with the squeeze. All the COTS hardware for easy implementation is a closed cul-de-sac and rather mediocre, and is condemned to be a neat gimmick that quickly loses its luster.
It's possible you've been scammed. I suspect there's a big market in selling knock off Hue bulbs because they can mark up the price so much more.
I guess a loophole might be to make the border router matter compatible but none of the actual devices. At which point you really shouldn't be buying them anyway.
Matter is an interoperability standard so that devices expose a common API. It works over WiFi, Bluetooth or Thread currently.
Thread is a network protocol like WiFi or Bluetooth.
The QR codes are used for pairing devices to a Matter controller.
The controller could talk to the border router if needed but that should be it.
Zigbee relies solely on noone being able to MITM the pairing process, where the security lies in the short window of opportunity and short range.
But Matter (and thus the Thread devices we talk about here) has an out of band mechanism for sending keys, since it requires QR + BLE.
I guess your point is that you typically can't form a Thread mesh between different border routers of different vendors. Which is unfortunate, but solvable. Don't buy/use border routers from such vendors. Because that problem is not the same as not being able to use a device from vendor X on a non-X border router.
Big advantage of Matter/Thread is that don't need a hub with its software. It is IP-based protocol. On Wifi or Bluetooth, your phone talks directly to the devices. On Thread, you need a gateway to translate from Wifi to Thread. Your phone only needs to know about Matter.
I don't think Matter devices talk over the Internet, I think they use non-routable IPv6 addresses. You can use HA to control over Internet but that uses the HA app. I don't know what other apps do, probably the same custom thing as with Zigbee.
Matter works similarly to HomeKit, with direct access to devices, but Matter adds the low-power Thread. It is also standardized so that could have generic Matter app instead of every device being its own app. And can add support to HA instead of custom Wifi and Bluetooth devices.
Some Google Home devices can be Thread hub, and Google Home can do Matter directly. iOS 16 has Matter support but not sure what that means. That may be the advantage that don't need to download app for each device but will be builtin to OS.
Companies don't really want to give us freedom of choice. They just want to take our money. Ideally through subscriptions so they have to do almost nothing for it but can cash in easily.
So all the "special sauce" doesn't have a technical reason but am economical one.
We at AirGradient see that very well that more and more companies force their users into the cloud and some monitors even refuse to show current air quality when not registered to the cloud. Imagine you would need to register your fever thermometer with an app in the cloud before you could measure your temperature...
Part of the problem is not only the investors in Matter but also VC funded smart home equipment manufacturers that are pressured to go down the recurring revenue business model.
At AirGradient [1] we want to demonstrate a counter example. Our fully certified air quality monitors are open source hardware and thus we provide the firmware code and they can be easily re-flashed with whatever software you like to use. With this openness a great community has emerged that maintains integrations to various systems like Home Assistant via ESPHome.
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/
I don't have an immediate need for one of these, but do you have any plans to expand to Europe or work with a local distributor? Inflated shipping cost & time, VAT & customs duties (+additional processing time) and a cumbersome return process if anything goes wrong, makes for a less than ideal shopping experience.
At the moment we still have a lot of dynamics in the product, eg frequent firmware updates on the shipped units and this is why we currently prefer to ship directly.
Once things are more settled down we will look for fulfillment centers in Europe and the US.
Thanks to Achim for all your awesome work, by the way.
https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome
There isn't an HN promo code is there?
See: https://forum.airgradient.com/t/airgradient-integrations/703...
This way you’d get a list of potential customers and we’d get a notification when we’d get an easier option to buy your products.
We socially infantilized each other. Technology plays a huge role in that.
Voices of the past warned that extreme division of labor would result in humans that are lazier, stupider than the dumbest animal. People sit online screeching about the slightest social faux pas, do nothing about intentional destabilization of education, healthcare, and infrastructure by political parties.
We complain that every last mile problem, every edge case we encounter, was not solved already by Big Tech. Never occurs to us to solve them ourselves.
I grew up being taught how to rebuild cars from the frame up, fix houses for people in need struggling in Midwest winters, was mentored in physics, chemistry by college age aunts and uncles, had a grandfather who retired after decades of designing computers for IBM teach me analog circuit designs/implementations, and helped farmers birth/raise livestock, got a couple uni degrees a while back. I'm barely 40.
Meanwhile my office worker colleagues waste time and real resources driving for an oil change. They demand others solve their survival problems for them. Friends struggling in this economy have started chanting "If I'm just going to berated for not working 7 days/week for a rich person, may as well quit and work 7 days/week growing my own food, fixing my home."
Fingers crossed the fiat hallucination Boomers force us into serving is about to vanish with them. Physics does not put an obligation on the future to propagate their rhetoric.
I don’t drive, as it’s been largely both unnecessary and impractical with where I’ve lived in the past decade, but I know how to check and change the oil in a car, among other basic vehicle maintenance tasks. It’s not hard or time consuming.
When I owned cars I often used to fix issues myself (as I used to drive old ones I've replaced entire window mechanisms and wiring harnesses) but not the oil changes. It's just not worth it. And it's so much easier with a full hoist, I only had portable jack.
As for disposal: in a fair few places I’ve lived the city has had regular free pickups or drop off locations for “hazardous” domestic wastes such as oil, car batteries, etc.
IMO the real issue is lack of instilling a sense of agency at a young age.
You were taught how to build cars from a young age. I’m sure you were encouraged to try things yourself along the way. You learned that your actions have a direct impact on the world and that you have the ability to adjust your actions to adjust the impact.
(At least in the US) Education is so retention and information focused that we don’t teach _how_ to apply that information.
Because of this we grow up looking to others for how to do anything, even if we have the know how.
It’s usually not until later in life when people realize their actions can truly have an impact when applied correctly
You could have used a relative educated in economics. Remember that just because you’re an expert in one field doesn’t make you one in another.
Zigbee is also pretty cool, between these and an odd Wi-Fi only device here and there, it seems more than adequate.
The protocol is also excellent for battery powered devices in terms of super low power consumption: depending on the device's needs, the protocol allows for the device radio to be completely off for hours at a time. For example, I have a couple of key fob controllers that we use daily but we haven't replaced the batteries in them for years.
My only fear is that "consumerist" IoT platforms that change every few years will usurp it and new Z-Wave devices will become unavailable.
I hit a problem where it was really difficult to debug setup / configuration problems.
I suspect this was due to zwave devices being as cheap as possible: my devices had just 1-2 buttons and 1-2 blinky lights for configuration.
I would have gladly spent $30 more per device to get better device diagnostics.
It really just seems to come down to your local market. Zigbee seemed to have more compatible devices in the US vs zwave so I went with zigbee. I only have about fifteen devices, mixed between a few manufacturers, but it's been rock solid after I switched from my initial conbee to a sonoff dongle.
All wired Z-Wave devices also act as repeaters to extend the network, which is handy.
The Z-wave devices turned out to be significantly more unreliable surprisingly.
The only z-wave device I still have running is my smart lock. Everything else has been replaced with zigbee.
Also important: not overdoing it. I don’t have tons of time to tinker with devices, HA, etc.
In similar vein ESPHome and Tasmota are 2 independent FOSS projects that can replace proprietary firmware on many commercial smart devices based on ESP32.
Some WiFi-based smart devices like those made by Shelly work without internet access and integrate with HA via local HTTP API.
Fully local smart home is possible, but you'll need to research what you're buying - as a general rule, you should avoid WiFi-based smart devices unless they offer a local API. Everything else (ZigBee, Z-Wave) should work offline without proprietary hubs, though I'm sure there are exceptions.
BK72xx: BK7231T, BK7231N RTL87xx: RTL8710BN, RTL8710BX
https://esphome.io/components/libretiny.html
But yeah, using both Tasmota and ESPHome I’ve moved all (bar one) of my “WiFi Only” devices to being fully local devices.
(The exception being my thermostat for my heating, that uses a tuya-mcu and a LCD driver IC so I don’t really want to reflash that and faff with the tuya-mcu this side of winter, and I’m planning to replace it with a OpenTherm controller next year anyway. In the meantime I’m using a local tuya integration in HA to just send it commands directly)
It's good to see that people are able to hack this stuff and make it less reliant on the companies. Heck they're probably selling some of it at a loss and hoping for recurring revenue from usage stats and other spying.
The bulbs aren't as good as Philips Hues though.
[1] https://cloudfree.shop/
Convenience ? One minute of me debugging a http request to fix my light is evaluated dearly.
If that happen once it will offset years of voice light off/on and other lazy ass of poor design workaround.
Not just with HA, but tech in general really. I love the idea of FOSS, but it's important that stuff just works, every time, without hackery.
But I still wanted to use Home Assistant to control lights. The solution? Smart light _switches_ and wall plugs.
I went with Lutron Caseta wall switches and plug-in dimmers. (Expensive at $60/switch.) Lutron has been doing commercial automation for a very long time and it shows.
1. They work without any automation. Most dimmable LEDs will work.
2. The remotes connect directly to the switches and don’t need a hub.
3. The pro hub model connects to home assistant. You can use unpaired remotes as switches. (Using the correct blueprints.)
I’ve had this set up for over a year and I’ve yet to replace a battery on the many dozens of remotes I have. And I’ve never had a problem with the switch not working.
I get to do all the tinkering I want without breaking my house. :)
Note: I do have some Phillips Hue bulbs for color but those are in lamps separate from overhead lighting.
I understand how compelling the marketing hype seems at first, but a quick investigation reveals this to be yet another mafia shakedown and effort to lock down and prevent any meaningful competition.
They have a 16-bit Vendor ID. That's 65,535 vendors supported. Globally. Ever. One must pay the CSA ([0] $2,500 per PRODUCT or $7,000 per YEAR) for one of these artificially scarce identifiers.
In order to download specs, you're expected to accept TOS, authenticate and then you're emailed a (presumably authenticated) link to the PDF [1].
You need to wait for the consortium to define every single application layer detail for each and every type of thing [2].
Of course, the decision makers are unable to make high quality decisions since their own businesses depend on trapping customers in their respective walled gardens. The goal is to prevent any small or medium sized businesses from competing with the small handful of multinational megacorps.
From what I can tell, it's all of the worst parts of USB, without HID and Serial to fall back on for things they didn't think to define.
[0] https://csa-iot.org/become-member/#Membership
[1] https://csa-iot.org/developer-resource/specifications-downlo...
[2] You must download the "Device Library" spec yourself, as my link is fingerprinted and I do not wish to violate a hidden TOS clause.
[edit] formatting
I didn't know any of this. I pay attention to IoT (and run a modest Home Assistant setup in my home.) Had I known about these constraints, I would have written off Matter from the beginning.
What were they thinking?
As soon as you need to instantiate something with atoms, the cycle-times and overall difficulty increases exponentially. Just when you think you've got something, all these despicable gatekeepers shove their hands in your pockets.
There are lots of reasons we can't have small batch, niche electronic products, and these license fees combined with even worse regulatory costs require enormous sales volumes to amortize.
It's really concerning to see the same rent-seeking values making such strong headway in the software space over the past 5-10 years too.
Take a gue$$
This is why I love HN, thanks for pointing it out.
Isn't that the same as USB or PCI? Both also have a 16-bit vendor ID.
The USB-IF also artificially limits the vendor address space, which gives them the ability to charge exorbitant fees before anyone can deploy a device without conflicts.
I haven't tried to build and deploy a PCI device yet, but given your point, I assume the same game is being played.
At least with these 2 technologies, they can lean on being around for some decades. Bits were quite a lot more expensive 20+ years ago.
Another measly byte (or two) could have made it possible for fees to be reduced down the road, but as-is, there is an artificial barrier to popular access.
WiFi has gotten way more reliable, and devices with open local APIs are more common now. Bluetooth is even starting to be used occasionally. YoLink's LoRa based hardware is still better than anything else even slightly affordable, even though it's still totally a closed cloud based platform.
I assumed my link in my email was fingerprinted as there are some odd characters encoded into the URL.
As it turns out, it matched the search result link.
That's good to know.
Thanks!
On the other hand some manufacturers are now actively fighting home assistant and the matter switch is non existent. A total zero number of devices in my home run over matter, something that I didn’t expect given the huge amount of excitement early on.
It feels like rather than everything slowly converging I now run two hubs still, custom smart home apps, a largely unreliable and useless home assistant next to some things with HomeKit.
I really can’t stand it and I’m incredibly frustrated by it.
I just started using it and getting into home automation, and that’s disappointing to hear
> If Matter can succeed in convincing companies to compete on the merits of their devices—not the incidental revenue that comes from being a single-system device provider, or phone app marketing...
The sentence you (partially) quote starts with "if" and ends with "wish". Cough.
You didn't make a point yet.
You claimed I misunderstood, then quoted a sentence that starts with "if".
For such lights, the permanent power usage of the controller can be much larger than that of the light, even if you accidentally leave it on way longer than needed now and then.
The EU limit allows each controller to use 0,5w. See https://commission.europa.eu/energy-climate-change-environme.... And they do use close to that. The Philips Hue bulb uses 0,4W when off. See https://www.anandtech.com/show/6805/philips-hue-automated-ho....
So, that’s about 10Wh a day. If you use that to control a 10W light, you’d have to decrease its ‘on’ time by a hour a day to come out positive in energy usage. I have many lights that aren’t even on that long each day.
I think home automation of lighting fixtures as a way to conserve energy made way more sense before LEDs became common.
You can't choose which device on the network is the controller when setting up a new device to a network.
For instance if you have a home assistant blue it might choose your Amazon echo to initiate the network. Therefore you have multiple networks running which may not respect your privacy or choice.
I think that is because the characters tend to have a very nonchalant way of using it: Whatever terminal is nearest can be used to interact with stuff in vicinity. There are no boundaries between devices, services, or the like; everything communicates with everything else, over any channel available, without further thinking.
If we ever get past showing off how the ceiling bulb can do red light, maybe we could start having a protocol for automatic device capability negotiation/discovery?
But after that, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have separate devices anymore, but a single digital identity across all of them, with an interface to control unique capabilities of each of them?
For a banal example - there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to set a timer on our phone, and check it on a computer, or kitchen counter display. On the other hand, I can’t check on the progress of my vacuum robot from my laptop, because the vendor only offers a mobile app. I can’t pull the stats from my car at all, I can’t check a hard drive without plugging it into something compatible, I can’t easily send a big file to someone nearby. Technology should allow us to do all that.
Devices should promote their capabilities and offer a standard interface to control them, and simultaneously be able to display controls for the interface of other devices, depending on available means of input. Done well, this can actually be zero config.
Open source could do it in theory, but only for nerds. Open source can’t create mass adoptable products because making technology easy to use is fabulously expensive and difficult.
I don’t think the market alone would create a unified rail or telephone network. Yet that has brought immense benefits for society at large, and vendors still manage to capitalise on top of the plumbing.
if you have an account online somewhere you can log in from any device. the device itself is merely a machine to run the code downloaded from your online account. you could do everything though that account and treat the device like a dumb terminal.
any specific device that provides special functions, like your car, could also connect to that account and upload its data there, so you can access it from anywhere else.
technically this is already possible today.
I wouldn't mind connected services, but when my data is held hostage and the one in control is a faceless company, it does not feel like technology anymore, something that would help you accomplish your task better. Take my smart tv, I would be glad to connect it to my network and not bother with the apple tv when I want to play a movie, but the last time I tried, it tried to forcefully upgrade itself and wouldn't let me skip some onboarding screen that tried to get me to create an account. I had to unplug it. Or when some headphones or mouse manufacturers want me to use bloated proprietary apps just to configure them.
While what you describe is technically feasible, it never feel like this as tech companies always start a conflict with their (paying) users by taking their data hostage, enshitifying their platforms, and destroying any attempt of integration.
i don't know if my idea how to do this is to simple, but essentially, i think what is needed is the ability to connect all my devices into a virtual network, where some of these devices act as connection portals to allow me to interact with them from any other device. i think the hardest part is the security of these remote devices so they don't leak my credentials to others using the same device later.
And this should be across domains. A data or diagnostics scanner for example should be able to retrieve data from my car, from my fridge and from my hear rate monitor.