I was cautiously optimistic when Matter/Thread was in its early days, but predictably as with most of these industry backed standards it’s turned into another pay to play walled garden. The CSA seems to be particularly bad at this.
Cant wait to see in subsequent years all the additional e-waste when manufacturers consider devices obsolete, and no one can repurpose them because of Matter spec mandating secure boot.
Certification is an obvious way and that costs money.
Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?
I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.
As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.
Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.
I had no idea that Matter/Thread mandates secure boot. Presumably that's secure boot without end user freedom to load their own keys. That's no good.
This is why all the (commercial!) high-end home automation uses KNX, because installers can mix and match products and know they won’t get cornered even if a single manufacturer goes out of business.
(And if you want a cheaper system that can be operated with fully-free tools, you’re already covered, that’s ZigBee! But even KNX is “open” once you buy the license for ETS - the config tool - and then you can go to town on your system and reconfigure it at will.)
Sibling commenters have already answered this in the affirmative but a better question is: what examples can you give supporting your thesis that certification drives high conformance?
I'm likely in a bubble but most certification systems I've seen exist in highly "competitive" landscapes (read: competing standards) & exist purely to support an ecosystem of institutions relying solely on certification to make money & providing no other value back to the system (e.g. in the form of standards advocacy, conformance testing or even standards maintenance). To the point I've come to anecdotally equate "certification" with wild-west/scammy corporate practices.
So as far as I've seen certification often has the opposite effect that you propose. At least in the IT & software space.
Open source a reference implementation and a conformance test suite. Open, transparent, and low cost. Also, don't lock out devices that aren't blessed.
I have been avoiding "IoT" in my home because I want stable 20+ year lifetimes for protocols and standards. I want to know that the outlets I hard-wire today will be controllable with whatever software I choose in 5, 10, 15 years. I want my thermostat to continue to have all its "smart" features for the lifetime of my HVAC system. I don't want separate "apps" for my washer, dishwasher, automatic water shut off, etc. I don't want Internet connectivity to servers that may be turned off at a manufacturer's whim to gatekeep features (or worse, basic functionality). The market is dysfunctional.
Maybe I'm making some category error here but I can think of dozens of protocols that do not require certification.
It "works" in the sense that it excels at separating implementors from their money and locking up end users in a cage, sure.
It's not clear to me why the manufacturers aren't just making LoRa radios. This feels like an xkcd 927 situation to me.
LoRa PHY is proprietary by Semtech but LoRaWAN the data link layer is open, that's why the manufacturers aren't just making LoRa radios.
SigFox is full-stack proprietary LPWAN solution but the founding company already went south.
Currently the main open standard alternative to LoRa is IEEE Wi-Fi HaLow.
The main problem with these LPWAN standards, however, is that all of them struggling with limited Line-of-Sight (LoS) or Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) LoS environment that's very common in LPWAN. For example LoRa is very low power but its limited chirp spread spectrum (CSS) based modulation is bad for any limited LoS environment. In addition, its spreading factor (SF) only work for a single channel per user.
I'm now working on the LPWAN PHY alternative that's much better for very limited LoS than LoRa. Looking forward to benchmark against Suzi.
Why would I want yet-another-standard with self-updating devices, using more power (strong cryptography), and closed to certified devices only.
And Suzi sounds like it is going to stomp all over Lora? Hard to tell from that marketing fluff.
What is the pain there?
And all this so Samsung et al can siphon off more user data and show more ads.
I fully understand the consumer viewpoint.
But, it's great news imo with sub-GHz (Suzi)!
That was added with version 1.3 of Matter, released in the middle of this year. You just need to wait for your smart home ecosystem to support it and for IKEA to release a firmware update.
As far as ecosystems go, Home Assistant (HA) fully supports it, as does Samsung SmartThings. Google has a public beta, from what I've read. Amazon and Apple are in the on the way stage.
As far as device goes, all my energy monitoring smart plugs are Tp-link Tapo, and they have been quick to update firmware. I'm using several Tp-Link Tapo P110M Matter smart plugs [1] and a Tapo P316M Matter smart power strip [2] with HA.
The P316M, purchased in the middle of October, came with firmware that supported Matter 1.3 out of the box. I simply added it to HA using the "Add device" button on the HA screen and it worked.
The P110Ms, purchased at the start of this month, came with older firmware so they did not show energy use out of the box in HA. A quick trip to the Tapo app to add them to it during which it checks for and installs the latest firmware, brought them up to the latest firmware. After that the energy monitoring information showed up in HA.
It's very confusing with a new Zigbee standard when I thought it was being replaced with Thread
And from the same organization that co-designed and promotes Matter.
Personally, I'm very happy that Zigbee continues to be developed. I am not very enthusiastic about everything being IP addressable (even if it is just ULA) and the convoluted Thread flow where a bunch of border routers require you to initiate the pairing with a phone over BLE to hand it over to the router. I have an Eve Energy Thread + Matter plug and it requires many takes to pair it correctly. Most Zigbee devices are just a matter of permitting join on your coordinator and holding/pressing the pairing button on the device.
I wish that Apple and Google would just add a Zigbee coordinator (or just leave home automation to others) and put some effort into supporting a wide variety of devices rather than trying to disrupt a perfectly working standard. They often cannot even bother implementing the latest Matter spec timely.
No one is giving their IoT devices public IPv4 addresses. They would be behind a NAT. RFC 1918 provides 17,891,322 usable IP addresses for each private network. If we want to be a little more adventurous, RFC 6598 provides an additional 4,194,302 usable addresses and 240.0.0.0/4 is another 268,435,454 usable addresses "reserved for future use" since 1989, but still sitting unused so we can use them as internal addresses inside a NAT anyway (for example, AWS uses this range internally).
Show me a network that is using all 290,521,078 addresses and I'll show you a network managed by a team of network engineers who can just set up IPv6.
Why would IP based routing be inherently more power hungry?
In Case you missed it, https://csa-iot.org/newsroom/matter-1-5-introduces-cameras-c...
> Matter 1.5 introduces one of the most anticipated additions to the specification: cameras. Developers can now build and certify cameras that interoperate directly with Matter-enabled ecosystems, without the need for custom APIs or integrations.
> Matter cameras support live video and audio streaming using established WebRTC technology, enabling two-way communication and both local and remote access via standard STUN and TURN protocols. The specification also defines support for multi-stream configurations, pan-tilt-zoom controls, detection and privacy zones, and flexible storage options, including continuous or event-based recording to local or cloud destinations.
You might as well put a pause on any new IP camera purchase for now until these hit the market.
Ignore and move on.
If you want home automation, either pony up for KNX (you can do it yourself, the only “closed” part of the ecosystem is that the configuration tool is paid), or use conventional Zigbee with an open-source coordinator like Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant, or Wi-Fi devices that either have an official local API like Shelly or reverse-engineered one.
Matter/Thread/etc is just the latest iteration of creating the next batch of e-waste 5 years down the line.
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!
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.
Any reason you prefer Matter rather than Zigbee? Zigbee has been a thing far longer than Matter, so I don't think the "one more standard" criticism is valid here.
There is a very clear signal that is easy to pick up: either you support zigbee in your IoT device or you are trying to undermine the customer. No customer wants to be undermined. This should make Zigbee support a very easy choice for companies operating in a competitive space. Simply succeeding in the market should be enough and if it isn't that is the company's existential challenge.
Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.
The only worry is if manufacturers stop developing Zigbee products. Ikea for example made cheap and good Zigbee devices but they've said they're moving away from Zigbee.
You mean "Thread"? Or "Matter over Thread", which some vendors also just call "Matter" (which technically can also stand on it's own, but in many cases implies a Thread requirement). I'm wondering if that muddiness in bad communication will be a significant factor in hindering consumer adoption.
Where-as with DIAL and for the first decade of Google Cast, the device being cast to was basically a web browser & could run any url. It made it so any device could be cast to from any app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_Launch
It's been incredibly disappointing seeing Matter build a standard that completely fails to offer a usable path. I really want to be wrong here, but it sure seems like Matter Cast requires every device to have its own unique bespoke partnership & install already loaded, for everything that will be able to cast to it. It standardizes some protocols for how to communicate, but there's such an anti-standard vendor-controlled limited anti-ecosystem basis.
I really really want Matter to be a good better world. I hope Matter Cameras can bring some unity to streaming camera systems. But man I can not see how Matter Cast could be worse designed, more hostile to the freedom to cast that we've enjoyed, and I really worry for this ecosystem as a whole if this is what Matter is willing to ship.
I'd also really like to see affirmations that Matter is usable sans any big network, sans Google Apple and whomever else. That it really is something we can run ourselves. But I haven't seen validation that Matter really is as liberatory as it's promises, haven't seen evidence that folks really can undo the Internet of Shit damage with Matter. I hope it's just all us being extremely slow on the uptake, but I have heard just so little about running our own provisioning/control networks on Matter. I want so much to believe but my vibe is that we've been rug pulled again.
I'm using Matter (over Thread, mostly) with Home Assistant – in addition to using it with Apple HomeKit, but I could have done it exclusively HA. My devices get an IPv6 ULA from the border router, HA can directly talk to them without any internet or cloud involved. Does this qualify?
It's true that certain non-standardized features are only available through "extensions" ie. the device vendor app. But both Thread and Matter get new revisions, and the devices get firmware updates in a standard way (again, installable via Home Assistant) to take advantage of new features and stability updates. All of this has gotten better with time.
But the best thing about Matter is that I'm not locked into a specific ecosystem or dependent on an app from the device vendor. So, in my view it has been a slow start but with steady improvement. And the right direction IMHO.
Like what. I have several hundred zigbee devices of almost all category you can think of, and I have never come across such a requirement. I don't understand how that would even work.
Perhaps the solution is to make the spec open but make using the trademark contingent on certification (much like USB, for example)
(Not IoT)
The state-of-the-art solution is to put a bunch of people on planes and burn a bunch of jet fuel to attend a "test fest". You can't issue interoperability until you do this. This costs money that needs to be paid by someone.
A proper reference implementation should first and foremost come with an extensive battery of regression tests, something many a vaunted "standard" utterly fails to provide, being instead tomes upon tomes of impossible to decipher specifications, written - of all things - in human language.
Such a battery of regression tests, if properly design ought to take care of your "variations" in fairly short order.
I've got several Matter smart plugs and a couple Matter smart bulbs.
They all were quick and easy to set up with their first Matter controller (an RPi4 running Home Assistant or an iPad with Apple Home), and quick and easy to add to whichever controller I didn't use as the first controller.
They all worked then without requiring me to get their manufacturer's proprietary app or make an account or anything like that.
Some needed a firmware update to support Matter 1.3, and so I had to use the manufacturer's app for that. Some also have proprietary functions and options (for example one of bulbs supports some kind of presence detection if you have at least two of those bulbs in the same room) so I might get the manufacturers app if I decide I want to use those functions.
Adding them to the manufacturer's app does not interfere with their use as Matter devices so if I do decide I want to use some of the proprietary stuff it doesn't break things.
There are a couple of in-progress implementations of Zigbee on a regular computer using Thread radios and the Thread RCP protocol. Maybe one of them will add the ability to use multiple radios.
If I have one building with one automation system but the building is too physically large or has walls that attenuate RF too much or where I don’t want a router node in the middle or where the latency across a mesh is too high, I want to be able to extend the network at low latency by plugging in another network-attached radio base station but without needing to manually pair each device to the closest base station.
Thread does this out of the box. Zigbee does not.
Finally... This [0] does a better job of explaining the issues with Matter. But, Matter is ultimately a joke. It was promoted as a standard by vendors nobody should trust for interoperability at this point.
[0] https://community.home-assistant.io/t/if-matter-is-a-suppose...
https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/retail/the-new-smart...
I like them because they can use rechargeable AAA batteries but if I still have to touch them every few weeks to repair, I’d rather switch to a different brand that is more reliable and uses less ideal battery formats.
That said, the newish Inspelling plugs in the EU market are fantastic. They report reliably, can handle larger loads, and cost about €10. For that price, it’s hard to complain that they are a bit larger than other options.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
Then get a coordinator recommended for zigbee2mqtt:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/
Then install and start the following add-ons in Home Assistant:
- Mosquitto - zigbee2mqtt: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/installation/03_ha_addon.ht... - MQTT
And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.
You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.
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.
Matter is just the protocol and Matter over Thread is pretty sure to be prefered by everyone over Matter over Wifi because of the power draw.
The standardization is a plus though.
Meet zigbee2mqtt and ZHA. You only need a cheap USB adapter as a Zigbee coordinator and you are ready to go.