Comment by samoit
Comment by samoit 20 hours ago
I hope Matter becomes the "the facto" standard... now we have several more "standars"
Comment by samoit 20 hours ago
I hope Matter becomes the "the facto" standard... now we have several more "standars"
A lot of zigbee infrastructure also expect an internet connection.
These border routers also double as admins, and people want their smart home stuff to be available while they are outside their home network.
Thread devices can mandate internet connectivity the same way Wifi devices can.
Matter defines profiles and does certification that says your light bulbs cannot require an internet connection. The admin your water leak detector connects into can (and arguably should) alert you even when you are away from home, but the leak detector _itself_ cannot do that and be certified.
It is supposedly an open source standard that do not requires internet connection to work, and can use regular wifi (2,4ghz) networks as a means to connect devices so you do not need to buy a hub for them. You can create your own hub with a mini pc for instance with a regular wifi card. No need for specific hardware
No need for specific hardware
Meet zigbee2mqtt and ZHA. You only need a cheap USB adapter as a Zigbee coordinator and you are ready to go.
For matter over thread you do need a hub and you need more certifications for matter, so for manufacturers it is less open.
The standardization is a plus though.
I mean you can already do exactly that with zigbee after buying a zigbee usb connector which are extremely cheap.
I know because that’s what I have been doing for the past five years.
But to be fair my setup is now mostly IKEA so I guess I could go back to a bridge and stop having to maintain my stuff at some point.
What I really don't like about thread/matter is that it is becoming the de-facto standard that thread border routers are connected to the internet.
This will in time result in IoT devices that actually mandate this connection (it was already stipulated in a recent version of the protocol). The end result will be that a new protocol was created, but rather than devices being able to run on their own, we end up with beds in heating mode, ie. the garbage we were trying to avoid in the first place.
So for me, zigbee it is!