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What’s the Matter with the smart home? (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

https://z-wavealliance.org/z-wave-alliance-completes-z-wave-source-code-project-for-alliance-members/

So, still not ideal IMO, but better than what it was a decade ago I guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have Home Assistant on an old Intel NUC, with mostly Z-Wave switches and two IP based switches, one Kasa IP switch and one Shelly switch. The Kasa and Shelly show the divide in IoT. The Kasa is everything wrong with IoT, requiring an Internet connection to function and is slow to respond. Shelly is everything right as can be. It will work just fine locally without an Internet connection if you set it up that way, but can work cloud based if you don't have a system to control it.

I'm still on the lookout for Matter switches actually for sale, instead of projects announced and nothing else. So I still buy Z-Wave switches.