homeassistant
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
If esphome get matter and thread, the DIY smart home device ecosystem will go from great to amazing. Right now esphome just has trouble with truly low power devices due to WiFi, polling, standoff, sleep, etc... Matter instead of the esphome API will probably solve a lot of that.
There are esp32 variants that can do ZigBee. It's very surprising to me that there's no esphome for those. I'd think that the community would be all over that, but all I have found so far are abandoned GitHub repos. Maybe there's something I don't know about the chip or the protocol that makes it difficult?
Yeah there are large threads on them but because the API has been developed for WiFi, moving to a mesh like ZigBee would be a substantial rewrite although matter would be a lot easier than ZigBee, which got written off a long time ago as just too large if I remember right.
It is also a huge project for people to start developing on, their core team isn't massive, so there is a large barrier to entry for such a thing. It might be happening in the background though, no idea.
Matter sounds neat and all, but it's still wireless on the 2.4 GHz band, so it will still have the same amount of noise that Zigbee does.
That’s Thread. Matter is an application layer standard, which currently supports running over WiFi, Ethernet or Thread.
Matter could run over new wireless systems in the future.
Besides that, Thread is pretty low-bandwidth and low-noise. It's designed to sip battery life from devices.
2.4Ghz just allows it to be built into tons of devices without an extra chip. Every Google Hub, Alexa, or Apple hub supports it.
Every Google, Alexa and Apple hub support 2.4Ghz Wifi and likely can be a Matter controllers, however only a subset of them support Thread.
Ah, my bad, forgot about the threads thing. :)
WiFi is already pretty universal in smart automation systems, Matter doesn't matter much when the underlying protocol is Wifi. And since 99% of Matter devices are WiFi...
or over wired systems that are older
Matter is the protocol not the method isn’t it? Matter works over thread etc
Forgot that distinction. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
That's why I avoided ZigBee but my Hue bulbs have had WAY fewer problems than my z-wave stuff over the years, so I'm consisting migrating everything.
I originally started that way too but ZigBee has been super reliable for me and faster than my Z-wave network. I think it really depends on what devices you have and if one is misbehaving.
Is zigbee particularly noisy?
Tried a couple matter devices. Ended up having to create an account with the manufacturer. Was there truly a local option? Who knows. So far I haven't been impressed.
Opposite experience, only 2 Matter devices so far but both working on HA with external network access cut off in my router after I previously had them in Tuya.
I've had to do that so I could install new firmware to enable matter, but after that didn't need to access the manufacturer account anymore.