IKEA's Zigbee devices have been some of the more stable smart devices I owned. I wasn't running their hub, opting to run with deCONZ in the past and moving to Zigbee2MQTT in recent years.
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 have quite different observations. IKEA's Zigbee devices are the least stable devices I own and with smaller feature set.
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.
The FYRTUR blinds were kinda crap, constantly had issues with them losing their minds and having to redo the setup. I also have the later Tredansen cellular shades, and those have been good ... but I just checked and those seem to be discontinued as well.
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.
Huh, I have the entire second story of my house outfitted with FYRTUR shades and the only one that sometimes gives me problems is the one that crashed to the floor when the 3M tape holding it up failed. (Don't get me started on Andersen windows having no way to secure inside-mount shades without voiding your warranty.) That one seems to eat through its battery far more quickly that the others. All the rest of the ten or so shades work flawlessly with ZHA in Home Assistant.
> constantly had issues with them losing their minds and having to redo the setup
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.
Word on reddit is they discontinued the blinds due to reliability problems. I have 3 and 1 failed so makes sense to me. They want to bring them back, but it's a complete redesign, not just normal planned product lifecycle iteration.
Using the blinds with a second gen hub now for about four years. No problems at all. Dreading the day they fail as they’re non-negotiable during the summer.
FWIW I bought some Zigbee blinds from Amazon and they’ve been great. My windows weren’t the right size for the IKEA ones and the sellers on Amazon will custom make them for you to within 1/8 inch or something like that.
I went through the whole blind research rabbit hole and ended up with Smartwings via Amazon. I had looked into a lot of other providers and nothing had a similar combination of reliability, cost, and customer service.
I remember seeing that, though iirc it was a lot more surgery than I wanted to do on my blinds (which already had a shaky wife-acceptance-factor due to spotty zigbee connections). Thanks for the reminder, though.
I installed some IKEA bulbs and switches with the IKEA dirigera hub, and had a terrible time. For example a LED strip lost connection a few times, and wouldn't connect on its own without unplugging/plugging.
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.
Yeah, I have a Dirigera hub, motion sensors and lights running pretty stably. I connect them into HomeKit via HomeBridge and it's been solid.
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.
Most of my current-gen IKEA switches will pop out from their steel cradles with normal button presses, because of the curved back of the switch and the curved cradle it connects to magnetically. They've thrown in die-cut double sided adhesive tissue in what I assume was an afterthought, which doesn't peel from one backer sheet in any of the packages I've opened... Maybe it's humidity or temperature sensitive? After a couple of drops on the ground, some internal plastic cracks and tactile response is lost. I ended up using my own double sided tape but it's not a good user experience. I would bet the new switches don't have a curved back, certainly they've had a number of returns because of this aesthetic choice.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have been spending hours the past couple weeks "ensmartening" my home with IoT switches and power outlets. Home Assistant is gorgeous and is an absolute feat of engineering and a testament to the power of open source, but messing with it you can tell that it's very much "by nerds, for nerds". I don't expect my wife to learn to edit YAML files so she can customize a dashboard. The drag and drop editor mostly works but it's missing a lot of functionality. And if your network topology is anything but flat (i.e. everything connected to one consumer router, which probably does cover 95% of people) then good luck with any of the discovery technology like mDNS or broadcast domains. I have dnsmasq allocate hostnames and static IPs for all my stuff and manually punch in the hostname for 99% of things in HA.
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.
There are also Tuya zigbee devices and people have hacked local control of Tuya wifi bulbs to varying degrees. My best stuff is IKEA: their battery powered devices use AAA so I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s, and they make the only inexpensive Zigbee buttons I've seen that don't include a double-click (Rodret, not the very similar Somrig). The benefit there is commands are nearly instantaneous, rather than waiting for the maximum double click time before deciding it's a single click. The RGB bulbs don't have a lot of brightness to them in color modes, I wonder if that will change with the new products.
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.
Years ago, I specifically went with zigbee because it's low-power and a simpler protocol stack (and open). No need to even think if the device will run offline or what kind of API it will use. I'm running HA and all the hardware I needed was a USB zigbee dongle and that's it. You pair your sensors, outlets etc. to it using a GUI and by pressing a physical button. No need to coordinate anything yourself, the mesh network can take care of itself.
Does this mean they're abandoning Zigbee compatibility? In my experience, Ikea was making the most reliable Zigbee devices considering the price (as someone who just uses Zigbee and no Ikea hubs, just HA+Zigbee), and would be a shame to lose that, but maybe it's a clear sign I should investigate starting to use Matter more instead?
Matter is now a standard not just a common spec. Everyone should demand all new smart home devices support matter. (it is okay if you use Zigbee or some other alternative to control it today but you should still demand matter for the day you switch - that day should come)
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.
Unless you're running Home Assistant and open source nodes. You can build a Matter+Thread node that works on a nrf52840 MCU, there are examples in the Nordic SDK. But then, why would you bother with Matter which is so bloated it doesn't even fit in flash properly? The only example that works on 52840 requires external flash to hold the B partition for OTA updates :)
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.
That's not bad compared to Bluetooth. Also, you will need FCC cert by law and probably some UL certs if you actually want to sell you product anywhere so you are already looking at 10s of thousands even if you choose ZigBee. I would love to live in a world where indie hardware can launch wireless products without huge cert cost but that's not the world we live in.
I don't think you can do you own testing like you suggest. You can self declare but you still need to include test data in that declaration so unless you happen to own all of the highly expensive calibrated test equipment you will need to pay an external test lab.
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.
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.
I wasn't aware of that. One other concern I have with Matter is that, if I understand correctly, Thread+Matter devices get their own IP address with internet access, whereas with Zigbee all of that has to be controlled by the gateway.
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...
This is, to me, one of the absolute biggest selling points for ZigBee and Z-Wave.
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.
As I said, my experience has been that the cheaper products run on WiFi. I also don't like that a product advertising "Matter" doesn't answer the question of whether it uses WiFi or not.
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.
Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access.
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.)
> Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access.
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
>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.
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.
I don't use consumer off-the-shelf routers enough (these days) to know the lay of the land very well. But when I do get my hands on them (usually when a friend wants help with something), I do have a look through the config options just to see what functions they expose. And I don't see that kind of thing available in the configs of the stuff I've recently had my hands on.
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.)
Definitely will not be buying Matter stuff. Way too complicated, doesn't address the real problems in smarthome technology.
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.
It does address quite a few reliability issues - you can have multiple gateways into the thread network so it is actually highly available.
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.
> I usually take my smart devices with me when I move.
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 :)
Yeah as noted I don't have any Matter-based systems. Also, all of mine are designed to work with or without smart components: Aka, a light switch turns on or off the lights when you touch it.
Matter is just the software. A lot of Matter devices use Thread as their radio protocol (think of it as "Zigbee 2.0") though, and you need a separate radio/dongle for that.
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.
Yes and no. Zigbee is both the transport and the protocol, whereas Matter is a protocol but can run over different transports. Most common in Thread or WiFi, but it could be over ethernet or anything else, really. I would say Matter is not derived from zigbee, but Thread could be considered a derivative.
All previous Zigbee and current Thread devices are physically incapable of connecting to the internet - the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub.
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.
> the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub.
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].
Pretty sure Zigbee also defines a control layers, so there's such a thing as a standard switch or power meter, or thermostat which can be controlled by any generic piece of software.
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.
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.
I guess I got into smart homes quite late, and have the benefit of accumulated knowledge and got to skip out on decades of half-working devices.
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.
Having bought a few Matter devices now, I have discovered that, in practise, Matter is just as full of vendor extensions as ZigBee, and the quirks ecosystem that allows for interoperability despite vendor extensions is far less mature than with ZigBee.
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.
I realize Thread devices need a border router, but once they're connected to that router don't they get an IPv6 address with internet access? Or am I just misunderstanding the protocol?
A border router is not necessary in a typical installation! Its something you only need if you want to do fancy things. Otherwise a commissioner is sufficient (to bring the device onto the network.)
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.
Almost all real-world Thread networks I'm aware of have a border router in the form of an Apple TV, Nest Hub, Amazon Echo, etc, so I'm not particularly reassured by the fact that the protocol doesn't technically require one.
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.
Not 100% sure about Thread as I'm more used to Zigbee, but afaik the Thread router acts as either a proxy between your regular network and the Thread devices (you can wrap IPv6 packets so they can be exposed over regular ethernet) or the router is the smart hub itself and the nodes are not really accessible from the Wifi network.
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.
I have accumulated so much smart-stuff fatigue, I can't stand anything branded as "smart". This means, as you point out, 1) any outage in the chain between me and the vendor's app shuts everything down for me, 2) stuff behaves inconsistently all the time. (e.g. Bluetooth speakers with a smartphone/tablet player app -- every other time something goes wrong: the app frozen completely because search autocomplete lost packets; you can't find the damn playlist buried in a sea of features; another your device wakes up and steals the bluetooth speakers.)
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.)
Modern smart switches are pretty small (most of them are designed to fit into wall sockets behind plugs/light switches).
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.
That is my approach. It requires quite a few components to work:
* 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.
Currently renovating our house, everything will be KNX based. Offline, no servers needed (even within the house) but nice for visualization, standard, 500+ vendors of compatible hardware. Highly recommended.
Elegrp switches can be used offline. They need to be provisioned online first though, unless you flash with esphome (which can't currently be done wirelessly), but then you'll have to write a custom integration config.
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.
I really like the idea of an open, local standard for this stuff. I have been a little annoyed at the matter standards immaturity still. Two things I’ve noticed is that there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi. What you’d like to do, for example for a battery powered sensor, is to go into deep sleep and disconnect from the WiFi and then wake up periodically and report the sensor reading. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, you can’t really tell a matter hub that you’re going to disconnect from wifi and when you expect to reconnect and not have matter mark the device as missing. There are some things you can do with certain WiFi routers, but they’re not universally supported and they have time limits.
The device type catalog is also somewhat limited, for example there’s no garage door device type.
> there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi
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.
Thread is fine, but also wifi is fine. Sleepy end device doesn't work very well with wifi, as I understand it, (from trying to implement it using the ESP32 SDK), because Matter generally wants all devices to check in several times an hour at least.
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.
ESP32 has inherent sleep issues and before their latest chip (c6 I think) 'deep sleep' was really a gpio- or rtc- triggered boot followed by a power off. Doesn't mean it's impossible to implement wifi sleep efficiently, but if you do the math anything wifi based won't work off cr2032 for even a year unless daily updates is all you need. Motion sensors are supposed to fire more often, and with much less latency that can be done via WiFi, so it doesn't really work for battery powered sensors in the general case. You could probably use ESPNow and a custom gateway node but at that point it's just another custom RF protocol and you're better off with something standard like 802.15.4 or BLE..
You can put the ESP32 into deep sleep, and it can wake based on a timer, or it can run the ultra-low-power core which is a very slow, very low memory, very low power core. It's good enough to look at ADC or I2C devices and do a little math. This can be woken up fairly frequently to check a sensor, and say, compare against a previous measurement, and then wake up the main core if you need to process the measurement or do WiFi.
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've seen somebody on Reddit using LoRa stuff for the home.
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.
It's good to move to Zigbee/thread/z-wave anyway because they're all better protocols for smarthome stuff. Plus wifi means you might be buying stuff that relies on cloud, which is a non-starter for anyone that doesn't like buying future paperweights.
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.
10.0.0.0/8 is entirely reserved for private use. I don’t see any home users needing more ip than that and even then you could just switch to v6 and be done with the worry.
Bandwidth and interference will likely be an issue far before ip scarcity.
That's why Matter and Thread are IPv6. You don't need IPv4 at all... and if you run out of IPv6 address space, I'd love to see just how many devices/sensors you have in your home.
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.
Approximately every home wifi router I've ever used has a class C subnet configured by default, out of the box.
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.)
Matter is nice because of its mesh and low power wakeup. but esh networks are hard to get right. Matter is better than BLE mesh but still not perfect. If you like to build yourself better to use MQTT (deal with a little latency when you turn on your light) on esp32 (nice and low power modes) and Wi-Fi repeaters around the house.
I've never really got the smart home thing, and the shit being pulled with the likes of "smart" TVs and cars has really put me off any sort of network connected device I can't control.
How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?
> any sort of network connected device I can't control. How would you use this and ensure privacy and security?
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.
The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.
Or if you want something more of an appliance, some other Hubs with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread + Matter support are: Homey Pro, Homey Bridge, Aeotec SmartThings Hub, and Hubitat.
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.)
Imho Home Assistant is the way to go - there's just so much weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions, you'll run into some limitation that you can't get around.
HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.
I tried Home Assistant, but found it fiddly and to have weird limitations, e.g. the recommendation to limit statistics collection to 90 days for performance reasons (so you have to set up something like InfluxDB otherwise). The UI is also weird and not very logical.
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.
Apple doesn't make water heaters, A/Cs or furnaces, and I don't think most people would junk their own because it doesn't know how to integrate with Matter.
Before buying any IOT devices, see if you can download the firmware from the manufacturer's website. If you can't, do not buy that product.
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.
As someone who is a bit of a luddite when it comes to smart home features, there are 2 things that really stand out to me that i would like.
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.
Open/Close sensors + lights (and optionally luminance sensor) is what I find to be useful. When I open my home door the light turns on automatically if it's dark enough.
I use YoLink products for #1. LoRA radio based with 1/4 mile range and low power consumption. I have one on my shed door. Frequently on sale at Amazon.
Easy — you’re not their target demographics. Almost all of my friends have some sort of “smart” devices, and I’ve helped personally to install them when things were a bit annoying (Spotify not syncing, dhcp not working properly and etc.). Absolutely not a single person cared about the “privacy and security” issue.
I think IKEA does care about this kind of stuff. In the past couple of years there has been an ongoing enshittification of smart home devices to move into the IoT space requiring a Wi-Fi connection that always pings a "home server" and when aws-east-1 is down your lights don't work or whatever.
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
It's not that complicated to get, some of them have useful features.
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.
running home assistant on a raspberry with a zigbee usb hub is a weekend project and it gives you full control of your devices, you don't need internet access or any cloud subscription to control them.
I don't have much experience with Thread + Matter (except the only device I have, an upgraded Eve Energy being a PITA), but for Zigbee/Z-Wave you do not have to be an amateur network engineer. Pairing is really straightforward and devices will automatically mesh and get routed by most mains-powered Zigbee/Z-Wave devices. It's not like you have to set up DHCP, manage an IP address range or anything like it.
I really wish wall switches and dimmers were included in the first drop. I've long been in the market for affordable Matter over Thread switches with a matte white finish from a reliable vendor.
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.
Is anyone aware of or working on an equivalent to zigbee2mqtt but for both Matter-over-WiFi and Matter-over-Thread devices?
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”.
Coming as a very disgruntled and burned Philips Hue owner. Only four bulbs, but Philips is a name which leaves behind bile when spoken.
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.
I'm curious why you are disgruntled with Philips Hue. They were quite honestly one of my happiest purchases, though I bought them when they were the only programmable color lights available to buy and I would probably get another model today.
They started requiring an account to use the lights, and support started stating stating that the bulbs will not be usable without an account or the app, with the CTO stating intention to deprecate the local APIs entirely. This flies in the face of why I bought Hue. These are woes I thought I'd be "safe" from when I bought from Philips. I never wanted to create an account or use an app.
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.
FWIW, they still seem to have not actually pulled the trigger on the account requirement and they've removed the "Starting soon" portion of the nag bar text in the Hue app (though it's still on the web page you get to when hitting "Learn more"). I do wish they would either get it over with or make it clear they're not actually going ahead with forcing accounts though.
That would be annoying and could well have pushed me off the platform. I guess I avoided that* because I downloaded the local mobile sdk for the hue lights early on, and coded up an app which met my peculiar needs, never looking back. I always figured the bulbs needed firmware updates to be pushed to them from the official app, so I just never initiated that, and so it never became an issue. I still regularly build the iOS app and use it to variously control the lights.
*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.
Do you have pointers about the firmware update part? Aren't they just Zigbee devices in the end that you can connect to any other Zigbee hub? I thought it's primarily required when using their bridge?
For the power user, I don't see much that Matter/Thread offers over Zigbee. The "unified command protocol" is not much of a problem with attentive device selection (and for chinese products there is Tuya) and as for Thread, it's not dramatically better. There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace, you will find that Zigbee/Wifi outnumber Matter devices 10:1.
> There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace
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.
Another take: what does it offer companies? They don't really want interoperability. Google, Apple, Alexa are the gravitational forces, and most mainstream devices already support them. Matter makes device maker's platform/own device portfolio aspirations weaker.
for a smart home device company who wants to be the platform by means of vendor lock-in, it offers them nothing. but that's not everybody, and hopefully the companies trying to do that fail.
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.
Will zigbee2mqtt be able to talk to these? Or are they in a fully different type of network? If not, any other software that can do MQTT bridging with these?
So what's the skinny with Matter devices? I was potentially looking into one so that I could plug my Moccamaster into a smart timer (wonderful coffee maker, but the lack of programmable functionality has my wife constantly wanting to pull out our old Ninja), and I liked what I read about Matter. But it would be my first Matter device and I started to get discouraged when the documentation said I would need to purchase a Matter "hub" or something to act as the controller, so I held off.
I probably could. The challenge came from wanting it to turn on at different times on different days (basically whether my wife is going into the office or working remotely on a given day), so once we started getting into wanting different schedules for M/F, T/W/Th, and S/S, the programmable one just seemed like the way to go, particularly if I wanted to easily turn off a day on-demand.
You may already have a Matter controller. For WiFi Matter devices you may be able to use your smartphone.
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.
I just bought an AirGradient sensor and set up home assistant. What an absolute joy, both experiences (though I had issues building AirGradient's firmware due to some issues on their end, to their credit their dev team told me they're going to adopt my recommendations) are streamlined and professional and super easy to set up for a techie. I've already got in the habit of opening the window to the office as the sensor detects elevated CO2 (happens faster and more often than expected, very glad I invested).
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 suggest the SenseAir sensors. They don't seem as susceptible to fakes, and auto calibrate when exposed to fresh air. Supported by ESP home so build is simple.
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.
Still looking for a good "smart stove" for the mother-in-law who is showing early stages of Alzheimer's/dementia, but in complete denial and will not seek medical advice. So, I need something to be able to monitor it, turn it off, etc. LG or Samsung seem to be the only games in-town - I have also looked at a smart-plug capable of 220v, but - that "all-or-nothing" may be overkill.
An induction stove doesn't answer your monitoring needs, but it's probably the safest thing to cook with. Only heats up when there's a pan, not prone to fires, ours even complains loudly if something unexpected is happening (eg lots of spilled liquid).
Every induction stove I’ve ever used though, was designed by someone who either has never heard of human interface design, or has done and entirely hates the concept of it.
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 housesitted at a very nice house with an induction stove and it was one of the most anti-human designs I've ever experienced in a stove. If I wasn't being as clean and tidy as possible for the sake of the homeowners I couldn't imagine how much worse it could've been as the entirely touch based interface added a whole other layer of frustration on top of the extremely confusing UX. I thought this was maybe unique to this stove but every other induction stove I've seen sold at appliance stores has had the exact same layout. I truly don't understand it.
Hobs built into the countertop are usually like that (and I hate them vigorously for the reasons you state), but freestanding furnaces (oven plus hobs) exist with big physical buttons. Since the buttons are on the front of your unit, the heating surface is still flat and easy to clean. Smeg makes nice ones, and I’m sure others exist.
I spent a year in a bunch of airbnbs and every time there was an induction hob it had at least one of these issues. I really like them otherwise but the buttons are just so bad.
Pull out my phone to turn on the heat on my stove ? A simple and satisfying mechanical motion that’s in my muscle memory since forever ? Hard to express how much I would hate that !
Dials are easy to pop off and clean behind. What sucks with the flat buttons is they wear out in 10 years now you get cleaning solution behind the plastic into the internals.
Is there an article that has the US pricing anywhere? It doesn't look like any of these are on the US site yet so I am curious what these will actually cost.
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.
Do any of these devices alert when the electricity is cut? I never hear talk about this but I had this happen -- power went out while I was on vacation and I didn't figure it out until much later when I tried to cook some of the food from the freezer.
There are many options for simple digital refrigerator/freezer thermometers that will show you a historical maximum, for that particular issue, some of which have smart integrations. There are also "maximum-registering" analog thermometers with a little indicator that gets pushed along as the needle goes up, then stays in place when it drops again.
Tangential but I was wondering if anyone knows of a thermostat that can work with a security system for the most simple and accurate location sensing possible- when I press away on the alarm it turns the HVAC to eco type settings to save energy. I used to get this with Google Nest and location sensing from my phone but Google as always is killing my generation of Nest thermostat. I think I’d like to get away from location sensing entirely. Every time I leave the house I do the alarm, so that is all I need.
Certainly there's something with home assistant (or apple shortcuts) you can do? There's some nest firmware replacement that's a bit DIY, but HomeAssistant and friends will be the way to bridge between differing home automation bits/services.
Can be relatively simple inside of Home Assistant. I have my alarm attached to Konnected, and that has an HA integration. I can both arm and disarm my alarm through an HA dashboard, and also have it arm itself if both myself and the wife are out of the house. You may not even need the alarm integration part- you can just use the home/away functionality and set the thermostat. The thermostat integration part I am less sure about, just because I haven't used it, but it should be fairly easy to set the set temps based on your home/away status.
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.
I find pairing my IKEA bulbs and switches and whatnot to my Conbee 2 stick sometimes hard to do.
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).
Agreed. I had no problem with the conBee II itself, but it did take me a while to figure out different IKEA ZigBee devices required different 'secret handshakes' to tigger pairing. eg number of button presses within a second, I think one was 5x, another 4x, and lights were different again. Still, I prefered that hasle than having a hub dialling home.
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.
Their new smart plugs finally seem reasonably sized.
I love IKEA’s smart home products, but their smart plugs (and many of their device power plugs) are comically sized in the US. Their original US version of the TRÅDFRI plugs wouldn’t even allow for two to be plugged into the same (standard size) dual wall outlet. Their more recent TRETAKT is much better, but still larger than competitors.
It’s a newer standard backed by multiple vendors (importantly, Apple, Google and Amazon, who make the devices that you ultimately want to use to control these things).
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.
This is correct more or less. The Ikea hub has had the ability to bridge its zigbee devices to Matter for a while now. So in my case, Apple Home has no idea my lights and switches are not Matter, they just show up there even though they are actually zigbee.
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).
I guess because to most consumers, it doesn't actually matter. It uses matter and connects to a matter hub, the way it does it is an implementation detail unless you're making your own hub with homeassistant or something.
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
The alternatives are all closed-source protocols. A ton of things are backed by Google. It doesn't mean that they have anything to do with it other than them being consulted in its design and providing some official support. And considering Google makes the most popular mobile OS, and also the most popular TV OS (which is relevant considering it's smart home), it's good that they're in on it. Otherwise you end up with a fractured situation like you currently have with things like Airplay, Chromecast and Miracast, which are all the same thing with slightly different implementations because they couldn't agree on a protocol.
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.
Zigbee is the wireless network protocol. The equivalent to it on the Matter side is called Thread, also based on Zigbee from what I read (was developed by Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly known as Zigbee Alliance). Zigbee and Thread operate at OSI L1-3, Matter is L3/4-7.
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.
You never needed a bucket of hubs with things like zigbee2mqtt or the Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant. That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol. Actualyl you can also pair between them different vendors products (i.e. Ikea remote with Philips bulbs)
While you could do that, the hub needed to implement the logic to actually convert the different "APIs" that the products spoke. E.g. imagine an IKEA remote sends "button_on" to turn on the light, but the Philips remotes send "light_on" or something. Philips lights will work with their remotes but not with IKEA remotes, since they wouldn't know what to do with "button_on". Zigbee2mqtt and ZHA are great projects that implement a compatibility layer to all of this, but they do have to explicitly support every device (and they support basically _every_ device there is, thanks to a ton of community work, they're genuinely great projects and something that wouldn't really be possible without open source). You mention that you can pair between different vendor's products, but that's not quite the case - you can pair different vendor's products to the hub, and the hub can translate between them. But while you can pair an IKEA remote to an IKEA bulb without a hub, you can't really do that between different brands.
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.
> Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer.
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.
> you can pair different vendor's products to the hub, and the hub can translate between them. But while you can pair an IKEA remote to an IKEA bulb without a hub, you can't really do that between different brands.
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).
Thanks, I didn't know that this worked! I guess this is more of an informal standard that they ended up following Philips' lead on, but still, better to have this kind of thing be officially defined.
> You never needed a bucket of hubs with things like zigbee2mqtt or the Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant
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.
It’s less of a switch and more of an upgrade. The hub will continue to work with Zigbee devices, it just adds Matter support to those devices you already have.
Might be an upgrade if you're using devices through Ikea's hub, but if you've been buying Ikea's zigbee devices for use with some other zigbee network it's a bummer that you won't be able to get them anymore.
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's an application layer standard that describes how devices should present themselves and present information and accept control signals in a standard way.
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.
>I can only speak to my experience, certified devices by the largest firms will mostly not interoperate (fails around authN).
>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.
You could get an IKEA Dirigera, but one of the upsides of Matter is that you do not need the manufacturers hub anymore. So an Apple Homepod or a Home Assistant instance with a Thread stick will do as well! (Or any other Matter hub for that matter of course)
You're looking for a Thread border gateway. Lots of stuff already has it. Someone mentioned AppleTV and HomePod mini. Newer Google Nest speakers/displays have it as well.
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.
Is it absolutely necessary to have a base/gateway? This Verge article[0] seems to imply not, but it's not at all clear to me what I lose.
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.
It's not strictly necessary to have separate a hub/controller, no: After all, a Matter controller is just a small computer-widget that sits on a network and talks with IP packets.
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.)
Can't Matter devices connect directly to Apple HomeKit? So if you have a HomePod (or even a MiniPod though I'm not sure) it should connect all these Ikea devices too.
Although I have been trying to only buy 'needs' not 'wants' recently, I did stockpile a few IKEA ZigBee gadgets before they retired them. One of the few product lines their MBA's hadn't destroyed.
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 hope these new IKEA light bulbs finally reproduce deep greens. Some cyan shades were also nearly white. Blue and red shades were fine. (Not so coincidentally green shades are always missing from IKEA's product photos.)
I bought many ikea products when I moved to a new place, only to be disappointed by all. The light bulbs create a hissing noise, so much to be unusable for bedroom and living room. I put then in the bathroom and storage.
The app is much worse than the previous generation.
Their sofa bed was so much worse than the much cheaper one I had earlier, I dubned it my worst purchase in the last 5 years, outcompeting the Samsung TV.
Lesson learned: just because my favorite brand has good products a couple years back, does not mean I should walk in and buy things from them again.
The term "range" (in the context of a "home") typically describes a multi-function cooking appliance that features a rangetop for heating pots and an oven directly beneath it. Why is this page about lightbulbs? The subtitle even has the word they should've used instead of "range": "products".
To be fair, I think most usage is of the form "range of ____". Even the definitions provided illustrate this with "range of options", "range of opinions", "range of model railway accessories". The exception is "This jacket is part of our autumn/spring range", which is a formulation that I've personally never heard; I would generally expect "autumn/spring line".
IKEA's Zigbee devices have been some of the more stable smart devices I owned. I wasn't running their hub, opting to run with deCONZ in the past and moving to Zigbee2MQTT in recent years.
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 have quite different observations. IKEA's Zigbee devices are the least stable devices I own and with smaller feature set.
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.
What brands from AliExpress can you recommend?
The FYRTUR blinds were kinda crap, constantly had issues with them losing their minds and having to redo the setup. I also have the later Tredansen cellular shades, and those have been good ... but I just checked and those seem to be discontinued as well.
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.
Huh, I have the entire second story of my house outfitted with FYRTUR shades and the only one that sometimes gives me problems is the one that crashed to the floor when the 3M tape holding it up failed. (Don't get me started on Andersen windows having no way to secure inside-mount shades without voiding your warranty.) That one seems to eat through its battery far more quickly that the others. All the rest of the ten or so shades work flawlessly with ZHA in Home Assistant.
> constantly had issues with them losing their minds and having to redo the setup
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.
Word on reddit is they discontinued the blinds due to reliability problems. I have 3 and 1 failed so makes sense to me. They want to bring them back, but it's a complete redesign, not just normal planned product lifecycle iteration.
Using the blinds with a second gen hub now for about four years. No problems at all. Dreading the day they fail as they’re non-negotiable during the summer.
FWIW I bought some Zigbee blinds from Amazon and they’ve been great. My windows weren’t the right size for the IKEA ones and the sellers on Amazon will custom make them for you to within 1/8 inch or something like that.
Which sellers? I have been looking for custom ones because I have some weird window sizes.
I went through the whole blind research rabbit hole and ended up with Smartwings via Amazon. I had looked into a lot of other providers and nothing had a similar combination of reliability, cost, and customer service.
I hope they make them quieter this time!
FYI someone made their own firmware which will drive the motor at a slower speed. Significantly reduces the noise.
I remember seeing that, though iirc it was a lot more surgery than I wanted to do on my blinds (which already had a shaky wife-acceptance-factor due to spotty zigbee connections). Thanks for the reminder, though.
I have non ikea electric blinds. Sure they’re a a little grindy but it’s like 30 seconds two a day.
I'd agree, except one of the main reasons I bought them was to wake up to natural light, not to wake up to WHIIIRRRRRRRRR.
Fwiw, Smartwings blinds are cost effective and have worked great for me for years now. Cone in both z-wave and zig flavors.
US brand only.
I installed some IKEA bulbs and switches with the IKEA dirigera hub, and had a terrible time. For example a LED strip lost connection a few times, and wouldn't connect on its own without unplugging/plugging.
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.
Yeah, I have a Dirigera hub, motion sensors and lights running pretty stably. I connect them into HomeKit via HomeBridge and it's been solid.
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.
The open/close sensors have been amazing.
same! i have my apt fully decked out in ikea zigbee devices. i really want them to do blinds again
Most of my current-gen IKEA switches will pop out from their steel cradles with normal button presses, because of the curved back of the switch and the curved cradle it connects to magnetically. They've thrown in die-cut double sided adhesive tissue in what I assume was an afterthought, which doesn't peel from one backer sheet in any of the packages I've opened... Maybe it's humidity or temperature sensitive? After a couple of drops on the ground, some internal plastic cracks and tactile response is lost. I ended up using my own double sided tape but it's not a good user experience. I would bet the new switches don't have a curved back, certainly they've had a number of returns because of this aesthetic choice.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have been spending hours the past couple weeks "ensmartening" my home with IoT switches and power outlets. Home Assistant is gorgeous and is an absolute feat of engineering and a testament to the power of open source, but messing with it you can tell that it's very much "by nerds, for nerds". I don't expect my wife to learn to edit YAML files so she can customize a dashboard. The drag and drop editor mostly works but it's missing a lot of functionality. And if your network topology is anything but flat (i.e. everything connected to one consumer router, which probably does cover 95% of people) then good luck with any of the discovery technology like mDNS or broadcast domains. I have dnsmasq allocate hostnames and static IPs for all my stuff and manually punch in the hostname for 99% of things in HA.
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.
There are also Tuya zigbee devices and people have hacked local control of Tuya wifi bulbs to varying degrees. My best stuff is IKEA: their battery powered devices use AAA so I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s, and they make the only inexpensive Zigbee buttons I've seen that don't include a double-click (Rodret, not the very similar Somrig). The benefit there is commands are nearly instantaneous, rather than waiting for the maximum double click time before deciding it's a single click. The RGB bulbs don't have a lot of brightness to them in color modes, I wonder if that will change with the new products.
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.
> I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s
I just switched to LIR2032s rather than replacing devices.
Exactly the same but rechargeable, and there isn't a ton of waste.
Years ago, I specifically went with zigbee because it's low-power and a simpler protocol stack (and open). No need to even think if the device will run offline or what kind of API it will use. I'm running HA and all the hardware I needed was a USB zigbee dongle and that's it. You pair your sensors, outlets etc. to it using a GUI and by pressing a physical button. No need to coordinate anything yourself, the mesh network can take care of itself.
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Does this mean they're abandoning Zigbee compatibility? In my experience, Ikea was making the most reliable Zigbee devices considering the price (as someone who just uses Zigbee and no Ikea hubs, just HA+Zigbee), and would be a shame to lose that, but maybe it's a clear sign I should investigate starting to use Matter more instead?
Matter is now a standard not just a common spec. Everyone should demand all new smart home devices support matter. (it is okay if you use Zigbee or some other alternative to control it today but you should still demand matter for the day you switch - that day should come)
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.
A standard where you have to pay to play. Cheapest option is 3000$ per product and 500$ annual.
Unless you're running Home Assistant and open source nodes. You can build a Matter+Thread node that works on a nrf52840 MCU, there are examples in the Nordic SDK. But then, why would you bother with Matter which is so bloated it doesn't even fit in flash properly? The only example that works on 52840 requires external flash to hold the B partition for OTA updates :)
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.
> Unless you're running Home Assistant and open source nodes.
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.
More information here:
https://wizzdev.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-mat...
But, yes, Matter/Thread is more expensive than Zigbee by a lot.
That's not bad compared to Bluetooth. Also, you will need FCC cert by law and probably some UL certs if you actually want to sell you product anywhere so you are already looking at 10s of thousands even if you choose ZigBee. I would love to live in a world where indie hardware can launch wireless products without huge cert cost but that's not the world we live in.
Use a pre-certified module and do your own unintentional emitter testing. It's not that hard.
You don't need UL for smart home sensors.
I don't think you can do you own testing like you suggest. You can self declare but you still need to include test data in that declaration so unless you happen to own all of the highly expensive calibrated test equipment you will need to pay an external test lab.
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.
This is a double-edged sword.
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.
I wasn't aware of that. One other concern I have with Matter is that, if I understand correctly, Thread+Matter devices get their own IP address with internet access, whereas with Zigbee all of that has to be controlled by the gateway.
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...
Others have pointed out I might be wrong about this. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837052
Having network access is my primary concern. The protocol was developed by the largest adware companies on the planet...
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.
This is, to me, one of the absolute biggest selling points for ZigBee and Z-Wave.
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.
Many Matter products are running on Thread, which uses the same radio as Zigbee and has the same power savings.
Thread doesn't have accessible IP address. It uses IPv6 and the ULA space which is non-routable.
As I said, my experience has been that the cheaper products run on WiFi. I also don't like that a product advertising "Matter" doesn't answer the question of whether it uses WiFi or not.
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.
Is there anything preventing a Matter product from also requesting an IP address from your DHCP server and getting a route out to the internet?
Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access.
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.)
> Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access.
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
>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.
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.
I don't use consumer off-the-shelf routers enough (these days) to know the lay of the land very well. But when I do get my hands on them (usually when a friend wants help with something), I do have a look through the config options just to see what functions they expose. And I don't see that kind of thing available in the configs of the stuff I've recently had my hands on.
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.)
Definitely will not be buying Matter stuff. Way too complicated, doesn't address the real problems in smarthome technology.
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.
It does address quite a few reliability issues - you can have multiple gateways into the thread network so it is actually highly available.
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.
> I usually take my smart devices with me when I move.
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 :)
Yeah as noted I don't have any Matter-based systems. Also, all of mine are designed to work with or without smart components: Aka, a light switch turns on or off the lights when you touch it.
So, right now I use a Zigbee dongle on my a Raspberry Pi. Is that goimg to be possible with Matter?
Matter is just the software. A lot of Matter devices use Thread as their radio protocol (think of it as "Zigbee 2.0") though, and you need a separate radio/dongle for that.
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_...
Right, that sounds familiar. It's been so long since I've looked into this. Thank you.
Yes, here is the one I use https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
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The new Dirigera hub supports both for now (https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/knowledge/articl...) so they'll probably slowly transition.
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.
Investigate using home assistant and keep using both from one place.
you can get a Zigbee / Matter / Thread coordinator and continue using HA as before (google SMLIGHT)
Isn't Matter derived from Zigbee?
Yes and no. Zigbee is both the transport and the protocol, whereas Matter is a protocol but can run over different transports. Most common in Thread or WiFi, but it could be over ethernet or anything else, really. I would say Matter is not derived from zigbee, but Thread could be considered a derivative.
Both use 802.15.4 but iiuc zigbee does that with some incompatibilities.
That in itself is an umbrella.
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'm not investing in any smart home products unless:
* 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.
All previous Zigbee and current Thread devices are physically incapable of connecting to the internet - the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub.
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.
> the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub.
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...
Pretty sure Zigbee also defines a control layers, so there's such a thing as a standard switch or power meter, or thermostat which can be controlled by any generic piece of software.
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.
> A lot of devices are not compliant though
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.
I guess I got into smart homes quite late, and have the benefit of accumulated knowledge and got to skip out on decades of half-working devices.
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.
Having bought a few Matter devices now, I have discovered that, in practise, Matter is just as full of vendor extensions as ZigBee, and the quirks ecosystem that allows for interoperability despite vendor extensions is far less mature than with ZigBee.
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.
https://xkcd.com/927/
I realize Thread devices need a border router, but once they're connected to that router don't they get an IPv6 address with internet access? Or am I just misunderstanding the protocol?
A border router is not necessary in a typical installation! Its something you only need if you want to do fancy things. Otherwise a commissioner is sufficient (to bring the device onto the network.)
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.
Almost all real-world Thread networks I'm aware of have a border router in the form of an Apple TV, Nest Hub, Amazon Echo, etc, so I'm not particularly reassured by the fact that the protocol doesn't technically require one.
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.
Not 100% sure about Thread as I'm more used to Zigbee, but afaik the Thread router acts as either a proxy between your regular network and the Thread devices (you can wrap IPv6 packets so they can be exposed over regular ethernet) or the router is the smart hub itself and the nodes are not really accessible from the Wifi network.
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.
These are all Matter-over-Thread and meet your requirements, yay!
I have accumulated so much smart-stuff fatigue, I can't stand anything branded as "smart". This means, as you point out, 1) any outage in the chain between me and the vendor's app shuts everything down for me, 2) stuff behaves inconsistently all the time. (e.g. Bluetooth speakers with a smartphone/tablet player app -- every other time something goes wrong: the app frozen completely because search autocomplete lost packets; you can't find the damn playlist buried in a sea of features; another your device wakes up and steals the bluetooth speakers.)
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.)
Modern smart switches are pretty small (most of them are designed to fit into wall sockets behind plugs/light switches).
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.
That is my approach. It requires quite a few components to work:
* 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.
Currently renovating our house, everything will be KNX based. Offline, no servers needed (even within the house) but nice for visualization, standard, 500+ vendors of compatible hardware. Highly recommended.
Also currently renovating our house, will not put any smart home stuff in it at all.
Elegrp switches can be used offline. They need to be provisioned online first though, unless you flash with esphome (which can't currently be done wirelessly), but then you'll have to write a custom integration config.
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.
I really like the idea of an open, local standard for this stuff. I have been a little annoyed at the matter standards immaturity still. Two things I’ve noticed is that there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi. What you’d like to do, for example for a battery powered sensor, is to go into deep sleep and disconnect from the WiFi and then wake up periodically and report the sensor reading. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, you can’t really tell a matter hub that you’re going to disconnect from wifi and when you expect to reconnect and not have matter mark the device as missing. There are some things you can do with certain WiFi routers, but they’re not universally supported and they have time limits.
The device type catalog is also somewhat limited, for example there’s no garage door device type.
> there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi
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.
Thread is fine, but also wifi is fine. Sleepy end device doesn't work very well with wifi, as I understand it, (from trying to implement it using the ESP32 SDK), because Matter generally wants all devices to check in several times an hour at least.
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.
ESP32 has inherent sleep issues and before their latest chip (c6 I think) 'deep sleep' was really a gpio- or rtc- triggered boot followed by a power off. Doesn't mean it's impossible to implement wifi sleep efficiently, but if you do the math anything wifi based won't work off cr2032 for even a year unless daily updates is all you need. Motion sensors are supposed to fire more often, and with much less latency that can be done via WiFi, so it doesn't really work for battery powered sensors in the general case. You could probably use ESPNow and a custom gateway node but at that point it's just another custom RF protocol and you're better off with something standard like 802.15.4 or BLE..
You can put the ESP32 into deep sleep, and it can wake based on a timer, or it can run the ultra-low-power core which is a very slow, very low memory, very low power core. It's good enough to look at ADC or I2C devices and do a little math. This can be woken up fairly frequently to check a sensor, and say, compare against a previous measurement, and then wake up the main core if you need to process the measurement or do WiFi.
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.
>there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi
That's what Thread is for.
I've seen somebody on Reddit using LoRa stuff for the home.
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.
It's good to move to Zigbee/thread/z-wave anyway because they're all better protocols for smarthome stuff. Plus wifi means you might be buying stuff that relies on cloud, which is a non-starter for anyone that doesn't like buying future paperweights.
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.
10.0.0.0/8 is entirely reserved for private use. I don’t see any home users needing more ip than that and even then you could just switch to v6 and be done with the worry.
Bandwidth and interference will likely be an issue far before ip scarcity.
That's why Matter and Thread are IPv6. You don't need IPv4 at all... and if you run out of IPv6 address space, I'd love to see just how many devices/sensors you have in your home.
Yup, the number of IP address is not a problem.
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.
Approximately every home wifi router I've ever used has a class C subnet configured by default, out of the box.
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.)
Matter is nice because of its mesh and low power wakeup. but esh networks are hard to get right. Matter is better than BLE mesh but still not perfect. If you like to build yourself better to use MQTT (deal with a little latency when you turn on your light) on esp32 (nice and low power modes) and Wi-Fi repeaters around the house.
I've never really got the smart home thing, and the shit being pulled with the likes of "smart" TVs and cars has really put me off any sort of network connected device I can't control.
How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?
> any sort of network connected device I can't control. How would you use this and ensure privacy and security?
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.
The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/
Or if you want something more of an appliance, some other Hubs with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread + Matter support are: Homey Pro, Homey Bridge, Aeotec SmartThings Hub, and Hubitat.
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.)
Imho Home Assistant is the way to go - there's just so much weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions, you'll run into some limitation that you can't get around.
HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.
I tried Home Assistant, but found it fiddly and to have weird limitations, e.g. the recommendation to limit statistics collection to 90 days for performance reasons (so you have to set up something like InfluxDB otherwise). The UI is also weird and not very logical.
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.
Luckily me and my partner are all Apple, so even though the smart home is backed by Home Assistant, our interface to it is via the Home app (or Siri)
Apple doesn't make water heaters, A/Cs or furnaces, and I don't think most people would junk their own because it doesn't know how to integrate with Matter.
So these things are phoning home. The exact opposite of why Home Assistant is existing.
Before buying any IOT devices, see if you can download the firmware from the manufacturer's website. If you can't, do not buy that product.
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.
As someone who is a bit of a luddite when it comes to smart home features, there are 2 things that really stand out to me that i would like.
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.
It seems like you have a strong enough use case to justify it!
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.
Open/Close sensors + lights (and optionally luminance sensor) is what I find to be useful. When I open my home door the light turns on automatically if it's dark enough.
I use YoLink products for #1. LoRA radio based with 1/4 mile range and low power consumption. I have one on my shed door. Frequently on sale at Amazon.
Easy — you’re not their target demographics. Almost all of my friends have some sort of “smart” devices, and I’ve helped personally to install them when things were a bit annoying (Spotify not syncing, dhcp not working properly and etc.). Absolutely not a single person cared about the “privacy and security” issue.
That's just untrue, these are the exact products a privacy conscious demographic would/should buy.
Of course there are. IKEA just doesn’t care about them because the market is so small it’s just not worth it.
I think IKEA does care about this kind of stuff. In the past couple of years there has been an ongoing enshittification of smart home devices to move into the IoT space requiring a Wi-Fi connection that always pings a "home server" and when aws-east-1 is down your lights don't work or whatever.
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
You can have both, Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are really easy to set up and they are purely local.
I know I am not. I am such a luddite that I just can't understand solving the triviality of flipping a light switch.
It seems like something for bored, married people.
That's half the point, these are using local communication (Matter over Thread) and are not cloud based. Privacy by default
It's not that complicated to get, some of them have useful features.
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.
running home assistant on a raspberry with a zigbee usb hub is a weekend project and it gives you full control of your devices, you don't need internet access or any cloud subscription to control them.
ZigBee, Thread, and Matter are all locally controlled if you have a local controller that is controlled locally.
You'll still end up being an amateur network engineer though.
I don't have much experience with Thread + Matter (except the only device I have, an upgraded Eve Energy being a PITA), but for Zigbee/Z-Wave you do not have to be an amateur network engineer. Pairing is really straightforward and devices will automatically mesh and get routed by most mains-powered Zigbee/Z-Wave devices. It's not like you have to set up DHCP, manage an IP address range or anything like it.
I really wish wall switches and dimmers were included in the first drop. I've long been in the market for affordable Matter over Thread switches with a matte white finish from a reliable vendor.
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.
Is anyone aware of or working on an equivalent to zigbee2mqtt but for both Matter-over-WiFi and Matter-over-Thread devices?
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”.
https://github.com/matter-js/matter.js has a MQTT example for familiarity but the intention is that devices just communicate over UDP
Coming as a very disgruntled and burned Philips Hue owner. Only four bulbs, but Philips is a name which leaves behind bile when spoken.
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.
I'm curious why you are disgruntled with Philips Hue. They were quite honestly one of my happiest purchases, though I bought them when they were the only programmable color lights available to buy and I would probably get another model today.
Was it the dropping of support?
They started requiring an account to use the lights, and support started stating stating that the bulbs will not be usable without an account or the app, with the CTO stating intention to deprecate the local APIs entirely. This flies in the face of why I bought Hue. These are woes I thought I'd be "safe" from when I bought from Philips. I never wanted to create an account or use an app.
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.
FWIW, they still seem to have not actually pulled the trigger on the account requirement and they've removed the "Starting soon" portion of the nag bar text in the Hue app (though it's still on the web page you get to when hitting "Learn more"). I do wish they would either get it over with or make it clear they're not actually going ahead with forcing accounts though.
That would be annoying and could well have pushed me off the platform. I guess I avoided that* because I downloaded the local mobile sdk for the hue lights early on, and coded up an app which met my peculiar needs, never looking back. I always figured the bulbs needed firmware updates to be pushed to them from the official app, so I just never initiated that, and so it never became an issue. I still regularly build the iOS app and use it to variously control the lights.
*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.
Do you have pointers about the firmware update part? Aren't they just Zigbee devices in the end that you can connect to any other Zigbee hub? I thought it's primarily required when using their bridge?
Not sure, I washed my hand of the whole thing a few years ago.
It is a shame really, because the Philips Hue hardware and software was superior to the Ikea ones (logarithmic vs linear dimming curves).
Matter does have the concept of Binding which is exactly this. Not sure if ikea implemented it, but the spec supports it!
It's because tradfri is zigbee. matter is in some ways an independent successor to zigbee.
For the power user, I don't see much that Matter/Thread offers over Zigbee. The "unified command protocol" is not much of a problem with attentive device selection (and for chinese products there is Tuya) and as for Thread, it's not dramatically better. There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace, you will find that Zigbee/Wifi outnumber Matter devices 10:1.
> There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace
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.
that same vendor IKEA has also abandoned Zigbee after their support of a few years.
>For the power user
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.
Another take: what does it offer companies? They don't really want interoperability. Google, Apple, Alexa are the gravitational forces, and most mainstream devices already support them. Matter makes device maker's platform/own device portfolio aspirations weaker.
for a smart home device company who wants to be the platform by means of vendor lock-in, it offers them nothing. but that's not everybody, and hopefully the companies trying to do that fail.
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.
Will zigbee2mqtt be able to talk to these? Or are they in a fully different type of network? If not, any other software that can do MQTT bridging with these?
sadly not, and afaik they don't plan on adding matter support. Thats a big reason I'll stick with zigbee for now.
So what's the skinny with Matter devices? I was potentially looking into one so that I could plug my Moccamaster into a smart timer (wonderful coffee maker, but the lack of programmable functionality has my wife constantly wanting to pull out our old Ninja), and I liked what I read about Matter. But it would be my first Matter device and I started to get discouraged when the documentation said I would need to purchase a Matter "hub" or something to act as the controller, so I held off.
the skinny with all smart home tech is that if you try to get by without a hub of some sort, you're signing up for endless frustration.
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.
I probably could. The challenge came from wanting it to turn on at different times on different days (basically whether my wife is going into the office or working remotely on a given day), so once we started getting into wanting different schedules for M/F, T/W/Th, and S/S, the programmable one just seemed like the way to go, particularly if I wanted to easily turn off a day on-demand.
You may already have a Matter controller. For WiFi Matter devices you may be able to use your smartphone.
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.
I just bought an AirGradient sensor and set up home assistant. What an absolute joy, both experiences (though I had issues building AirGradient's firmware due to some issues on their end, to their credit their dev team told me they're going to adopt my recommendations) are streamlined and professional and super easy to set up for a techie. I've already got in the habit of opening the window to the office as the sensor detects elevated CO2 (happens faster and more often than expected, very glad I invested).
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 suggest the SenseAir sensors. They don't seem as susceptible to fakes, and auto calibrate when exposed to fresh air. Supported by ESP home so build is simple.
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.
I really hope that is CO2 and not eCO2.
Still looking for a good "smart stove" for the mother-in-law who is showing early stages of Alzheimer's/dementia, but in complete denial and will not seek medical advice. So, I need something to be able to monitor it, turn it off, etc. LG or Samsung seem to be the only games in-town - I have also looked at a smart-plug capable of 220v, but - that "all-or-nothing" may be overkill.
An induction stove doesn't answer your monitoring needs, but it's probably the safest thing to cook with. Only heats up when there's a pan, not prone to fires, ours even complains loudly if something unexpected is happening (eg lots of spilled liquid).
Every induction stove I’ve ever used though, was designed by someone who either has never heard of human interface design, or has done and entirely hates the concept of it.
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 housesitted at a very nice house with an induction stove and it was one of the most anti-human designs I've ever experienced in a stove. If I wasn't being as clean and tidy as possible for the sake of the homeowners I couldn't imagine how much worse it could've been as the entirely touch based interface added a whole other layer of frustration on top of the extremely confusing UX. I thought this was maybe unique to this stove but every other induction stove I've seen sold at appliance stores has had the exact same layout. I truly don't understand it.
Hobs built into the countertop are usually like that (and I hate them vigorously for the reasons you state), but freestanding furnaces (oven plus hobs) exist with big physical buttons. Since the buttons are on the front of your unit, the heating surface is still flat and easy to clean. Smeg makes nice ones, and I’m sure others exist.
I spent a year in a bunch of airbnbs and every time there was an induction hob it had at least one of these issues. I really like them otherwise but the buttons are just so bad.
There is an ease of cleaning value that comes from a single unbroken surface.
That said - placement needs some work. Or put the UI in a phone.
I like the Impulse Labs hob which has an unbroken surface and magnetic knobs that can be removed for cleaning.
This one is absolutely legit amazing, but the price, oof.
Pull out my phone to turn on the heat on my stove ? A simple and satisfying mechanical motion that’s in my muscle memory since forever ? Hard to express how much I would hate that !
Dials are easy to pop off and clean behind. What sucks with the flat buttons is they wear out in 10 years now you get cleaning solution behind the plastic into the internals.
I think the parents are mostly talking about touch buttons below the glass though.
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.
LG has built induction models with knobs for years. The touch surfaces are nice but can be difficult for the elderly.
Yep the LG induction models have a sensible UI with big knobs. The oven is pretty good too IME.
Yeah there are admittedly lots of designs that make me scratch my head.
Isn't a stove/cooker guard actually what you're looking for?
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.
Is there an article that has the US pricing anywhere? It doesn't look like any of these are on the US site yet so I am curious what these will actually cost.
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.
When I rented I just replaced things and kept them in a box and put everything back when I left.
The ZigBee range used to include a bulb and remote, so you just leave the mains switch on.
Otherwise, I used floor lights in the past with WiFi switchable sockets before I switched to ZigBee. The WiFi ones wanted to dial home.
These guys have prices: https://9to5google.com/2025/11/06/ikeas-new-lights-sensors-a...
Was looking for this one: ALPSTUGA air quality sensor: £25 (~$33 USD)
Do any of these devices alert when the electricity is cut? I never hear talk about this but I had this happen -- power went out while I was on vacation and I didn't figure it out until much later when I tried to cook some of the food from the freezer.
There are many options for simple digital refrigerator/freezer thermometers that will show you a historical maximum, for that particular issue, some of which have smart integrations. There are also "maximum-registering" analog thermometers with a little indicator that gets pushed along as the needle goes up, then stays in place when it drops again.
Tangential but I was wondering if anyone knows of a thermostat that can work with a security system for the most simple and accurate location sensing possible- when I press away on the alarm it turns the HVAC to eco type settings to save energy. I used to get this with Google Nest and location sensing from my phone but Google as always is killing my generation of Nest thermostat. I think I’d like to get away from location sensing entirely. Every time I leave the house I do the alarm, so that is all I need.
Certainly there's something with home assistant (or apple shortcuts) you can do? There's some nest firmware replacement that's a bit DIY, but HomeAssistant and friends will be the way to bridge between differing home automation bits/services.
Can be relatively simple inside of Home Assistant. I have my alarm attached to Konnected, and that has an HA integration. I can both arm and disarm my alarm through an HA dashboard, and also have it arm itself if both myself and the wife are out of the house. You may not even need the alarm integration part- you can just use the home/away functionality and set the thermostat. The thermostat integration part I am less sure about, just because I haven't used it, but it should be fairly easy to set the set temps based on your home/away status.
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.
Check out ecobee. It should set away mode how you need.
Oh interesting didn’t know they made security systems too.
My initial thought was if ecobee might integrate with the rest of what you already ave.
I don’t mind switching, the Ecobee security system seems a lot cheaper per month than my Simplisafe.
If you are retrofitting a complete house at the same time, look at KNX. If not, do not explore this rabbit hole.
I find pairing my IKEA bulbs and switches and whatnot to my Conbee 2 stick sometimes hard to do.
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).
Agreed. I had no problem with the conBee II itself, but it did take me a while to figure out different IKEA ZigBee devices required different 'secret handshakes' to tigger pairing. eg number of button presses within a second, I think one was 5x, another 4x, and lights were different again. Still, I prefered that hasle than having a hub dialling home.
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.
IKEA's previous line didn't have a great lifespan:
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.
Their new smart plugs finally seem reasonably sized. I love IKEA’s smart home products, but their smart plugs (and many of their device power plugs) are comically sized in the US. Their original US version of the TRÅDFRI plugs wouldn’t even allow for two to be plugged into the same (standard size) dual wall outlet. Their more recent TRETAKT is much better, but still larger than competitors.
Excellent.
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 have never heard of Matter before, but I was super satisfied with Ikea's zigbee products. Does anyone know why they switched?
It’s a newer standard backed by multiple vendors (importantly, Apple, Google and Amazon, who make the devices that you ultimately want to use to control these things).
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.
The way I understand it (please correct me) is that:
* 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.
This is correct more or less. The Ikea hub has had the ability to bridge its zigbee devices to Matter for a while now. So in my case, Apple Home has no idea my lights and switches are not Matter, they just show up there even though they are actually zigbee.
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).
> or whatever the Thread equivalent is called
Thread Border Router (for info).
Helpful datapoints thanks.
Backwards compatibility is huge.
I could be wrong! I'm trying to work out the details myself!
But I have heard that old devices will be backwards compatible.
Matter is definitely a step in the right direction, SDK is under Apache and the actual spec is freely available[1]
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_...
They've been talking about it for years and now they finally have a product?
https://www.theverge.com/tech/814928/ikea-matter-thread-diri... has some quotes from IKEA saying that they're using Thread. It's strange they didn't say in this release though.
I guess because to most consumers, it doesn't actually matter. It uses matter and connects to a matter hub, the way it does it is an implementation detail unless you're making your own hub with homeassistant or something.
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
“Backed by Google” is an anti-recommendation.
The alternatives are all closed-source protocols. A ton of things are backed by Google. It doesn't mean that they have anything to do with it other than them being consulted in its design and providing some official support. And considering Google makes the most popular mobile OS, and also the most popular TV OS (which is relevant considering it's smart home), it's good that they're in on it. Otherwise you end up with a fractured situation like you currently have with things like Airplay, Chromecast and Miracast, which are all the same thing with slightly different implementations because they couldn't agree on a protocol.
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.
Zigbee is the wireless network protocol. The equivalent to it on the Matter side is called Thread, also based on Zigbee from what I read (was developed by Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly known as Zigbee Alliance). Zigbee and Thread operate at OSI L1-3, Matter is L3/4-7.
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.
You never needed a bucket of hubs with things like zigbee2mqtt or the Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant. That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol. Actualyl you can also pair between them different vendors products (i.e. Ikea remote with Philips bulbs)
While you could do that, the hub needed to implement the logic to actually convert the different "APIs" that the products spoke. E.g. imagine an IKEA remote sends "button_on" to turn on the light, but the Philips remotes send "light_on" or something. Philips lights will work with their remotes but not with IKEA remotes, since they wouldn't know what to do with "button_on". Zigbee2mqtt and ZHA are great projects that implement a compatibility layer to all of this, but they do have to explicitly support every device (and they support basically _every_ device there is, thanks to a ton of community work, they're genuinely great projects and something that wouldn't really be possible without open source). You mention that you can pair between different vendor's products, but that's not quite the case - you can pair different vendor's products to the hub, and the hub can translate between them. But while you can pair an IKEA remote to an IKEA bulb without a hub, you can't really do that between different brands.
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.
> Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer.
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.
> you can pair different vendor's products to the hub, and the hub can translate between them. But while you can pair an IKEA remote to an IKEA bulb without a hub, you can't really do that between different brands.
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).
Thanks, I didn't know that this worked! I guess this is more of an informal standard that they ended up following Philips' lead on, but still, better to have this kind of thing be officially defined.
> You never needed a bucket of hubs with things like zigbee2mqtt or the Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant
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...
It’s less of a switch and more of an upgrade. The hub will continue to work with Zigbee devices, it just adds Matter support to those devices you already have.
Might be an upgrade if you're using devices through Ikea's hub, but if you've been buying Ikea's zigbee devices for use with some other zigbee network it's a bummer that you won't be able to get them anymore.
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's an application layer standard that describes how devices should present themselves and present information and accept control signals in a standard way.
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.
some background:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507971
Vendor lock in.
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.
Please enlighten me how the ip-network-using mattress in any way relates to a Matter and Thread network
>I can only speak to my experience, certified devices by the largest firms will mostly not interoperate (fails around authN).
>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.
What “hub” thing do I need to use this? I use an iPhone but really just want to use some physical remote switches.
I currently use Home Assistant but want to shift to something more “mass market” as I’m bored of being family tech support.
You could get an IKEA Dirigera, but one of the upsides of Matter is that you do not need the manufacturers hub anymore. So an Apple Homepod or a Home Assistant instance with a Thread stick will do as well! (Or any other Matter hub for that matter of course)
You're looking for a Thread border gateway. Lots of stuff already has it. Someone mentioned AppleTV and HomePod mini. Newer Google Nest speakers/displays have it as well.
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.
Is it absolutely necessary to have a base/gateway? This Verge article[0] seems to imply not, but it's not at all clear to me what I lose.
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...
It's not strictly necessary to have separate a hub/controller, no: After all, a Matter controller is just a small computer-widget that sits on a network and talks with IP packets.
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.)
For some degree of future-proofing you'll definitely want a device with a Thread radio.
(I've done paid work on Matter so I'll avoid giving possibly-tainted opinions on any particular vendor's products.)
Can't Matter devices connect directly to Apple HomeKit? So if you have a HomePod (or even a MiniPod though I'm not sure) it should connect all these Ikea devices too.
I use an IKEA Dirigera, which speaks both Zigbee and Matter.
An Apple TV or HomePod mini, if you want to stay within the Apple ecosystem…
Still waiting on an IKEA bidet.
Although I have been trying to only buy 'needs' not 'wants' recently, I did stockpile a few IKEA ZigBee gadgets before they retired them. One of the few product lines their MBA's hadn't destroyed.
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 hope these new IKEA light bulbs finally reproduce deep greens. Some cyan shades were also nearly white. Blue and red shades were fine. (Not so coincidentally green shades are always missing from IKEA's product photos.)
I bought many ikea products when I moved to a new place, only to be disappointed by all. The light bulbs create a hissing noise, so much to be unusable for bedroom and living room. I put then in the bathroom and storage. The app is much worse than the previous generation. Their sofa bed was so much worse than the much cheaper one I had earlier, I dubned it my worst purchase in the last 5 years, outcompeting the Samsung TV. Lesson learned: just because my favorite brand has good products a couple years back, does not mean I should walk in and buy things from them again.
The term "range" (in the context of a "home") typically describes a multi-function cooking appliance that features a rangetop for heating pots and an oven directly beneath it. Why is this page about lightbulbs? The subtitle even has the word they should've used instead of "range": "products".
Range (noun): a set of similar things https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/range
To be fair, I think most usage is of the form "range of ____". Even the definitions provided illustrate this with "range of options", "range of opinions", "range of model railway accessories". The exception is "This jacket is part of our autumn/spring range", which is a formulation that I've personally never heard; I would generally expect "autumn/spring line".
Range (noun): a large box-shaped device that is used to cook and heat food, either by putting the food inside or by putting it on the top https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/range#ca...
Observe how you have to scroll down past the other senses mentioned to reach this one; dictionaries usually put the common senses first.
"Range" here refers to a range of products, in this case a collection of Matter supported devices
"Products" would have had no such ambiguity.