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.
The big device manufacturers DON’T WANT INTEROPERABILITY. They want you nailed down to their ecosystem and hit you with planned obsolescence. Like most anything else in the economy, they want premium pricing. If you adopt open standards, then you’re competing with everyone else but now on price. The majority of device makers don’t want to do that. THAT is the problem with the smart home.
Are there any open source smart home technologies? (For this reason but also for privacy’s sake)
Home assistant and zigbee/z-wave (also Bluetooth) resolve a lot of issues people have with smart home kit. Matter/Threads, discussed in the article, is supposed to be an open standard to make fancier kit from the big companies work together seamlessly, we just aren’t quite there yet.
See:
Homeassistant helps a lot in that respect.
I’ve got a few smart home devices (lights, plugs, weed vape, TV backlight) and literally none of it is proprietary and it all works even if my internet connection is down!
Home-Assistant.
Technology throttled by human greed
We probably have the tech, know-how and capability to build a permanent massive orbiting space station with a highly efficient way to get there and back.
But we’re too busy fighting wars and trying to figure out how to screw each other out of another dollar. Most of our human energy and efforts are spent either trying to swindle money out of others or trying to protect ourselves from being swindled or just being swindled.
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 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.
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.
It’s surprisingly easy with Home Assistant. You really don’t need much tinkering, if any, to get the basics working quite reliably.
It’s surprisingly easy with Home Assistant.
Maybe for a more software focused person. I found it very cryptic the couple of times I tried (and failed) to get it up and running.
I’m much more comfortable with a soldering iron than a config file.
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!
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!
If you don’t use zwave/zigbee for your smart home you’re missing out.
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.
I went Z-Wave years ago based on some arbitrary feature (the Zigbee network size limitation, I think?) and have been very happy (and cloud-independent). However, Z-Wave device do tend to be more expensive, and it can be challenging to find some devices. Smart Z-Wave bulbs seem to have disappeared from the market, for instance.
I still have X10 stuff but need to move to something else at least for some things. I liked what I saw about z-wave in terms of being on another band from wifi and Bluetooth and also being more secure.
Then again I could wait some more too or just go z-wave and change later if needed.
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.proprietary software
Found your problem.
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 💜
As someone who does live in a “fully smart” home, used quite some time to plan it and had to fend of “smarthome” manufacturers like flies aroud a shitcake:
90% of all products on the market are a scam and shouldn’t be called smart at all - they are fancy “remotes” either via voice or mobile phone. Nothing about that is smart. That’s dumb. It is not more convenient compared to a proper lightswitch if I need to know a long specific voice prompt or take my mobile out of its pocket to switch on a certain light.
What the autor of the article requests is already on the market for decades - KNX/EIB any a few other standards (Modbus, Onewire, etc.) are available for ages, are not depending on one brand and one central component. There is no fucking need to stay within a walled garden but the point is: These systems exist for such a long time that they do not show up as “big introduction” at IFA or CES. They evolve gradually and to stay within German exhibitions are found at the Light and Building rather than the IFA. Because the first one is a builders/electronics exhibitions, the later a multimedia/TV trade fair. The Verge is simply at the wrong place.
To give you an idea of my (actually very common, nothing about it is very special) setup/usecases and what I mean with “smart”: KNX does everything that requires switching, all sensors, basically all background work excluding the doorbell (works via LAN) and Fingerprint (works via LAN).
Lights:
The system does recognise people automatically when they enter a room and their positioning in a room. Paired with enviromental data (natural light level in the room, outside light, time of the day, our schedule according to our calenders*) it determines the appropriate level of light based on the human centric lightning concept. Light will be brighter and more blue in the morning (unless I am coming home from nightshifts), darker and more orange in the evening (unless we have a party), very dark if you go to the loo at night. It furthermore recognises your positioning in the room (e.g. when you are in a certain part of the kitchen certain lights go on) or that certain power sockets draw power according to a certain charateristic (e.g. the TV goes on)
Temperature:
The system knows current inside and outside temperature and the expected forecast*. It will heat the rooms accordingly, e.g. will turn down the kids rooms during schooldays but have them back at temperature when school ends. If the system recognises that someone is still in the room for long after school should have started it determines that someone is sick/schools off unexpectedly and temps are adjusted accordingly. In the summer the system shuts the blinds according to the light level to keep the heat out - based on the current position of the sun(e.g. the eastern blinds are lowered in the morning but not the western ones) and outside light levels. It will let enough light in for everyone to work but at the same time keep the heat out.
Air quality:
The system measures the air quality of the rooms and outside air quality&temperature and does ventilate accordingly - or ask us to manually open a window if that doesn’t provide sufficient clean air. (But won’t do so if the Air quality outside is bad)
Windows/Doors:
All of them have sensors showing their opening status, some if they are properly locked.
Doorbell/Fingerprint:
The Doorbell/Fingerprint system is the only system not on the bus as Video is beyond the scope of what the system can transfer.
Devices/Appliances:
Most things are “dumb” integrated first- we see when the washing machine is done because of the power charateristic, we see if the refrigerator is broken the same way. While we use Home Assistant for additional comfort, it is not really necessary.
Visualisation:
We use both KNX only as well as Home Assistant. But I could change over to openHAB, ioBroker or whatever we want tomorrow.
*: This data has input from external sources.
My point is: This is done without much user input. And by using around 30 different brands. With dumb actors and sensors (blind e.g. are just a “on off” motor, windows are binary contacts, same goes for leakage, etc.) so the components can be exchanged easily. And you don’t pay the hefty premium everyone tries to sell you for their “remote controlled blinds” (twice the price for a shitty remote,another useless gateway and Alexa…) and it’s far easier to use different brands. And if the blind actuator brand goes bust (way more unlikely compared to a smarthome startup) it will work without a cloud and can be exchanged seamlessly with any other brand.
We are there. But it is not fancy enough for the media.
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The system environment does have radio based components - but you are right, some things cannot be achieved without deep integration with the house. But yeah, I rented for a long time and while I used radio based systems it is not as good. My hope is that it does get common enough that more and more landlords adopt it,at least for the midrange segment. We do actually provide some limited integration for a small apartment we rent out but currently it’s not something people care about tbh and the law here is a bit problematic in that regard, but that’s a very local problem.
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Actually our building is much older…But as written elsewhere, we had to renew everything anyway. I used Homematic before switching over to KNX (/KNX:RF) and while it was okay for a rental (and can do much more than people think) it’s still clunky unless you use HA as an additional layer and you waste a lot on batteries. But still, better than nothing.
We are lucky that we actually have the best renters we could ever imagine but their flat was renovated cabling wise before we bought the object so there was little use of implementing something that would require rewiring AND puts me deep in the “functional liablity and GDPR” hole. But if I ever need to rewire it, it will be done with KNX simply because I can do that myself. German/GDPR law sadly is a bit uninnovative in that regard - I would happily offer my renters fingerprint access but the fact that I then would need to do four different data transfer aggreements is a hard reason to not do it.
When renting out you very soon find out that the law is heavily geared towards big corperations like vonovia and fucks over the smaller landlords whenever possible, sometimes even to the disadvantage of the renter. E.g: I can easily produce heat consumption directly from the heating system for each renter, even can automatically send them this. It can hardly be manipulated and is seen as evidence in other countries… BUT: As we rent out two apartments I do not fall under the “small landlord clause”,even though the smaller one is just a studio. So I need to install a wireless heat measuring system on all radiators and warm water outlets. Now here comes the problem: These measuring devices need to be capable of wireless measurement soon. Funny, as all of them are in the same room…where the heater is. right next to the gateway.
But you need them by law and now I need to put this shit on my renters side costs… almost 25€/month (and that was the cheapest offer by far) per apartment. I rent out for somewhat reasonable prices (well below Mietspiegel), as I rather have friendly renters than max out what I get…but that shit makes me mad. (We “refinanced” it by me taking over smoke detector maintenance so we could keep costs the same)
Would you mind sharing an approximate cost to have that all done?
As we had to redo all wiring anyway (renovation of a 80 y old house) and worked in stages it’s a bit difficult to do an estimation. Generally we found KNX is about +15%/+20% to comparable conventional wiring depending on the complexity (conventional wiring is cheaper for simple “one switch one light” situations but gets immensely expensive for more complexity - we found KNX was cheaper for some situations like “four different switches in four different locations all switching different combinations of lights”). In total around 40k € for a large house- that includes rerunning all wires, a few specialities due to age of the house and installation by a master sparky but no programming by them(did that myself - it’s not that difficult actually but takes a bit of time to get into).
The KNX wiring in theory could be done by a amateur as it is 24v only, but 240V needs a professional here. If we had done all KNX wiring ourself and let the sparky only do the 240V part (which in retrospect we should have done) we would have actually gotten out cheaper than conventional wiring, but I had no time to do so.
Of course the level of integration we opted for is far beyond what you normally put into a house - it’s a hobby more or less and we will not break even in terms of energy savings ever - but as we had to do something anyway why not do it right. Additionally it is heavily geared towards us getting older (e.g. we have motion detection at the ground level beside the bed - this recognises if you get up at night and now switches the bedroom lights on at 5% red so the wife does not wake up and then switches the lights on towards the loo. The whole routine is capable of recognising that someone has fallen or is unable to get off the loo)
It all depends on the brands you choose - as KNX has a huge spectrum of suppliers there is everything from cheap switches that are hardly more expensive than regular ones and top notch switches that cost 500€ each…we went with rather cheap but flexible ones.
A friend did some calculations with normal “off the shelf” smart home stuff like Hue, etc. and was 20% above what we payed for comparable level of integration.
How did you come to all of these different rules for managing eg the lights? Did you have to program them all manually?
Yes and no. Each component comes with an “app”(basically comparable with a driver for PC hardware) within the programming software that does the setup.
So you don’t have to decide what triggers what and some part of the logic behind it - but the app often does most of the work and you do just some fine tuning.
To give you an idea: I decide which switches (I always have regular switches even if the light normally goes on/off automatically) and what detection zones should trigger the light X1. I then link the “Switch Action” to the bus address of the LED controller L1. The LED Controller then gets told what to do with that information. In my case I have two different modes: Normal and Partymode (I use Day/Nightmode for that). In Normal mode the App gets told to interpret a “On” Action as “start HCL” and a “off” as a,well “turn it off,dude”. The HCL mode then is started with the HCL Settings according to the time. I can adjust the settings for the HCL mode (e.g. I want it darker in the evening) or I can just use the preset.
Now for party mode the same switch action does not mean “use HCL” as the same light that I want at 1am might be nice if I am on my way to bed but not If my guests need to find the loo or their staff when leaving. So it’s now a simple “turn the light on at 100%”.
Once that is done you commit the change by programming the module and you’re done. (The components always communicate directly without a central module that could fail)
Now the beauty of the system is that you can be as flexible as you like. You want that switch to no longer switch on the lights but rather close the blinds? Sure. Just link it to another address.
To give you another example what the app does itself: The blinds do close according to the sun’s elevation. I basically just linked the relevant module addresses to the respective sensors,told the module the size of the blind parts (used for calculating the optimal closure position) and linked it to the “veto object” that is calculated by the home Assistant and send to the bus via IP Gateway (basically a object based on the estimated weather. I live in an area with heavy temperature drops). Everything else is done by the weather sensor - raising or lowering based on temperature and of course wind speed.
Each app can be automatically loaded but you can also load it yourself if working in an offline environment - as they need to be 100% downwards compatible you can always work with your hardware even as long as you have the app. I therefore have them all saved/backuped in case some company might go bust. (In theory you then can still get them through the association but I don’t want to rely on that).
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard? Will Google?
If not, there’s your answer.
Apple isn’t really a good example, they’re pushing the standard. I don’t know of any smart devices they make themselves besides the homepod.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard?
I stand to the question. Apple is pretty famous for saying what people want to hear, and not actually doing much.
My cynical interpretation of the right-to-repair announcement is: we know Europe is gonna cram this down our throats, so let’s try and get control of the narrative while there’s still time.
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.
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
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A year ago at Berlin’s IFA tech trade show (think European CES), Verge reporter Jon Porter witnessed a Google Nest Hub control an Apple HomeKit smart plug.
Despite being developed by the biggest names in the industry — Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and more — Matter has yet to deliver on its main promise.
We’re expecting news from robot vacuum giants Ecovacs and Roborock, and smaller smart home players such as Eve, Nanoleaf, SwitchBot, Aqara, Aeotec, and Yeelight are all on the show floor.
But what’s more important is the long and boring task of getting them to seamlessly work together to create a home that’s actually smart, not just a collection of disparate gadgets that solve specific problems.
The smart home standard introduces a secure, basic communication layer that allows for interoperability and local control.
It moves us away from proprietary protocols, dubious security standards, and cloud dependency to the point where — if appropriately implemented — we can feel comfortable allowing technology intimate access to our homes.
Saved 84% of original text.
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.
You mean like KNX?
Which we have for 3 decades now, is totally offline if needed and can by design not leak data without the user noticing, is available both wired an non-wired, is compatible across hundreds of manufacturers and even has some open source projects, is totally backwards compatible and does not require a fancy “central component” that might stop the whole system functioning?
Seriously: The whole smart home world is a scam. 90% of all products that are new and fancy are nothing more than “voice/mobile remotes” and not truely intelligent. They are used because people refuse to do their homework in terms of smarthome.
There is a number of options, but not all hardware is flashable and some that is can be work.
What I want is autodisoverable hardware open to be flashed by owners, by law. I want it for all devices to be honest!
I understand your intentions, but there question is why add this layer of complexity. A switch that is a switch and switches everything I want no matter what because it is forced by the common standard to do so and can not send any data ever is a good switch.
And tbh, while I am an absolute advocate for OSS I rather have a switch that is not depending on a possibly abandoned OSS project (been through that) - hardware in this field has incredibly long lifetime, much longer than almost all OSS projects (remember, EIB is older than Linux!) and does it’s complete job from day one. There is no evolution in some hardware in this field and all evolution that did happened did not happen hardware side but communication wise - where we are also hardware limited. It is therefore much more important to define a common standard for communication - which we have - than have flashable components (exceptions apply,sure). We need to force legislation to get a common standard of communication or at least mandatory offline gateway availability to prevent thousands of components going to waste in a few years.
It does not help your cause when you can flash the hardware but the hardware is still talking to the wrong, proprietary communication channels.
I want hardware platforms standardized and autodiscoverable. These things need to get updates after the manufacturer ceases to care. Also, these hardware manufacturers can be terrible at software. It should be like PCs. I think that is end point anyway. It’s just unmaintainable any other way, even if these are intended to be e-waste after only a few years.
