The article discusses expectations for smart home announcements at the upcoming IFA tech show in Berlin. While companies may unveil new smart speakers, cameras and robot vacuums, the smart home remains fragmented as the Matter interoperability standard has yet to fully deliver on integrating devices. The author argues the industry needs to provide more utility than novelty by allowing different smart devices to work together seamlessly. Examples mentioned include lights notifying users of doorbell activity or a robot vacuum taking on multiple household chores autonomously. Overall, the smart home needs solutions that are essential rather than just novel if consumers are to see the value beyond the initial cool factor.
I have yet to see a “smart home” feature that’s worth the potential problems, let alone the cost.
Yeah, a well-integrated smart home can do some pretty cool stuff, but it also means putting my trust in corporations even more than I already have to. Plus, I’ll have to worry about each major appliance I own possibly being bricked due to a buggy software update or a malicious hacker.
Keep my home nice and dumb. Thanks.
All valid concerns, but if you really wanted to, you could roll your own home automation setup using something like a Raspberry Pi, and optionally Home Assistant, and keep it all offline so that it’s safe from hackers.
Good point. I was assuming that “smart home” integration would require an internet connection, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Thank you for clarifying that!
Yes, you can, but it can be a lot of effort and a lot of time spent researching and tinkering.
It’s fine if you want that to be your hobby, but it can be a heavy lift for the average person.
You can easily have a smart home without any data leaving your home network.
You need three things:
- Home Assistant software (free and open source)
- ZigBee (also free and open source) smart devices made by companies that comply with the ZigBee protocol
- Most importantly, a ZigBee controller.
There are several options available (Deconz Conbee II, etc), and this device gets plugged into the same machine Home Assistant is on, and it allows HA to control your ZigBee devices directly. No “hub” sending your data to a cloud server, everything is done on your local network. If the devices comply with the protocol, you don’t need their hub, even if they say it’s required.
I use Hue bulbs, but have no Hue hub. I use many Aqara devices, but don’t have an Aqara hub. It’s pretty great and works very well!
The proprietary/cloud based threat bit me already. Installed smart vents in my home several years ago. They weren’t perfect, but they did really help even out my 3-bedroom, 2-story, 1-zone home. Now the app fails to login, the site doesn’t even attempt password recovery and I’m back to dumb vents… Customer support is a black hole and basically every product is and has been out of stock for years, so I’ve no hope of any happy resolution.
They apparently used to be supported by SmartThings when it allowed custom stuff, but that’s dead now too because Samsung didn’t want to allow it. I even tried to use their proprietary hub which said it could connect to them, but that shit didn’t work either.
If they’re SmartThings then they can probably be controlled with a Z-wave dongle and HomeAssistant
I know someone living in a really high-end “smart” home. We’re talking about a ton of hardware and proprietary software controlling practically everything in the house. From one app in a phone or iPad, you can control everything from the security cameras to the heater to the pool.
It’s basically the pinnacle of what all this technology intends to achieve, and tbh, it’s all a bit of a pain.
Diagnosing anything in the house has an extra layer of work. Is it the pool heater not working? Oh, no, it’s the app not working. Security alert from the house? A fly walked across the camera lens. Everything acting weird all the sudden? Guess the shitty monopoly broadband cable provider in the city is having issues again.
The system only stays afloat because of a 24/7 service contract with a company that specializes in these houses. Give a few months without that support, and things will start falling apart.
I get that this is a different class from the products from Google and Amazon, or even the various open source products, but tbh, I’ll take fragmented over monolithic and overarching.
I may be a bit cynical here, but to me, current smarthome systems are about two things: a) vendor lock-in, and b) holding your house hostage to push you away from one-time purchases and onto subscription services, much as is already hapening with computers/smartphones and modern cars.
From the seller’s point of view, subscription services have several huge advantages: they
can milk youhave a guaranteed revenue stream for the lifetime of the system, they can collect/sell lots of data about you, and they can ram any TOS changes down your throat which you will accept as long as you care about being able to turn on the lights in your kitchen.Interoperability is really bad for vendor lock-in, so I’m curious as to which supplier will implement it to what degree.
As for our house, it has some smart things, but none of those are connected to the internet, nor do I expect they ever will be.
For all its faults and risks, a smart home can still make your life a lot easier.
Ah the internet of infected things. Everything a mash up of open and closed source, old and new, then abandoned by the manufacturer after a few years for the next shiny.
Probably Linux based, wait to be taken over by a few botnets…
What is needed is an open, standardized hardware platform. You should be about to flash on the IoT OS of your choice that will be kept up to date.
The best smart home platform before are this was home assistant. And by gosh it still is the best by a mile. The difference in functionality home assistant has to anyone else is an ocean wide win for home assistant. It’s the only thing that even comes close to the utopia idea of a smart home so many have given up on. I love my home assistant 💜
Is there some reason just using z-wave and avoiding everything cloud is not just fine?
Seems like matter is more trying to resolve zigbee issues. Or am I missing something?
So a couple of things. Z-Wave is a proprietary protocol (developed by a single company called Zensys) and is a closed ecosystem, so personally, I’m not a fan of it. And it’s not great choice for interoperability either.
Zigbee on the other hand, is an open standard (IEEE 802.15.4), made by the Zigbee alliance, comprising of major tech companies. The Zigbee alliance later became the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), who are the ones behind Matter. Which is why it appears as if Matter is trying to resolve Zigbee issues.
In actuality though, Matter is trying to proposition itself as a generic standard for the modern IoT world, because things have changed significantly since the times when the Zigbee and Z-Wave protocols were conceived (late 90s - early '00s). The main thing that’s changed is that low-power and cheap system-on-a-chip (SOCs) and single board computers (SBCs) have taken over the world by storm, which has enabled manufacturers to push out cheap home automation products quickly. Making home automation products is no longer a traditional embedded systems and specialized electronics play, where you had to invest a lot of RnD into designing complex circuits, pay for a Z-Wave license etc. Nowadays, even a kid could make their own system using a Raspberry Pi and say Python, without needing any knowledge of low-level protocols or languages.
As a result, the home automation world is filled with too many manufacturers and products, all trying to do their own thing and in-effect, building several closed ecosystems, even though they’re all basically using the same protocols behind the scenes. Plus you also have the existing Zigbee and Z-Wave products.
So before Matter came into the picture, several manufacturers started making their own centralized hubs, as a means for interoperability, like Samsung’s SmartThings, or Apple’s HomeKit etc. Some even have their own closed hubs meant for their own ecosystem of devices, like the Philips Hue bridge. As a result, some homes may even have multiple hubs, with overlapping functionality.
Matter aims to unify all of that. So instead of Philips doing their own thing, instead of Samsung coaxing manufactures to make their systems compatible with SmartThings, instead of manufacturers kissing Apple’s ass to support their products, instead of x company making some half-baked bridging app for y company because the specs haven’t been fully documented or they simply don’t care… we have Matter. Matter aims to solve that mess, at least, on paper. It would still require manufacturers to actually buy into the idea and support the protocol, but at least it’s better than working individually with Samsung and Apple and Amazon etc, or reinventing the wheel and doing their own thing.
As far as I know z-wave has been open for years. Is there something not so about that?
I guess I stand corrected-ish. I’ve always ignored Z-Wave because it was a closed ecosystem. But upon reading more into it, seems like it’s only partially open. They only opened certain parts of the spec for interoperability in late 2016, the standard was ratified by the ITU in Dec 2019, and they formed the non-profit Z-Wave Alliance only in 2020. They apparently made the source code available end of last year, but it’s only available to the Z-Wave Alliance members.
So, still not ideal IMO, but better than what it was a decade ago I guess.
Other question. If you were starting now what would you do? I need to start replacing old X10 stuff. Zigbee? Z-Wave? Both? Wait for Matter to sort out?
I am kind of attracted to using Home Assistant either on my media center or on a pi.
Thanks.
Thanks. What do you know about the security differences? Some say pairing security of Zigbee not that great. Thanks.
Other interesting thing is Debian seems to have z-wave libraries but not zigbee ones. At least my version of Debian which is old stable. Home Assistant seems to support both.
There’s actually not much of a security difference between the two these days, both protocols have gone thru improvements, both use AES-128 encryption, both use frame protection etc.
That pairing issue of ZigBee was addressed with v3.0, which uses random install codes for each device.
If you don’t use zwave/zigbee for your smart home you’re missing out.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard? Will Google?
If not, there’s your answer.
The GitHub, if you’re wondering how exactly this thing works. A blog explaining it, and an example.
Is there any particular reason HTTP couldn’t have done all this?
HTTPS is heavy when you’re talking about the extreme low power, bandwidth, and compute devices matter is intending to support
its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices
those are off the top of my head; i’m sure there are more. HTTP is great, but new/alternate network protocols aren’t inherently bad: especially when you’re operating in a very constrained/niche environment
Yeah, I’m going to reserve judgement, but anything to do with IoT does make me suspicious off the bat.
its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices
Does it? It sounded like it was a server-client model in the blog post and a skim of the example, with devices as clients and whatever application as a server.
Is supporting this open a standard a law? It sounds like it could be an EU law, and it being one is the only reason companies would do it.
Hm, might make sense to make a suggestion to the Commission, think it’s a good idea.
It’s definitely not a law. Codifying this in law could stiffle innovation.
They said that about the usbc law, but that turned out well.
I think the major difference is that USB-C is a much more mature standard than Matter. But even then it’s not perfect.
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