Celebrate the holidays with open standards

Blog
1

It’s been a busy week with a lot of announcements around IoT standards, so I thought I would do a quick round up of them, and how it might impact Home Assistant users.

New IoT standard announced

As it’s been a while, the industry has announced yet a new effort to create a new IoT standard called Project Connected Home over IP. I think that there are a few interesting bits to this standard:

The standard will be royalty-free. This is big, as it means that it will be easy for companies to build products. Take, for example, Homekit, which is a great IP-based local standard. Homekit has strict licensing and royalties, which prevented it from widespread adoption.

The new standard specification will be written in conjunction with building an open source implementation of the standard. Once it’s all finished, we’ll be able to integrate this implementation into Home Assistant.

Finally, Apple, Google and Amazon are seriously involved, even contributing their own IoT standards to help bootstrap this specification. This significantly increases the odds of them also integrating it into their products. Since their products are everywhere, it means that more companies might incorporate the standard and it can get widespread adoption.

But don’t hold your breath. Developing a standard takes time. They aim for a draft to be released at the end of 2020. And that’s just the specification. Not any of the devices built with it. If (and that’s a big IF) everything works out, expect this standard to get into your home in 2022.

Z-Wave to become an open standard

Silicon Labs and the Z-Wave Alliance have announced plans to open up Z-Wave in the second half of 2020. Among other things, this allows other companies to create Z-Wave radios, which could result in wider adoption and cheaper devices.

Open Source HomeKit Accessory Development Kit

As part of the Connected Home over IP announcement, Apple has released an open source version of their Accessory Development Kit (ADK). The ADK allows devices to be controlled by HomeKit controllers like Home Assistant (and ok, iOS devices). The spec was already open and Home Assistant implements it via the Homekit integration. Opening up the ADK still helps because it gives a reference implementation to see how the spec should work.

Bonus: deCONZ hass.io add-on gets Ingress support

It’s not really related, but a little. deCONZ is Zigbee controller software that works with the Conbee Zigbee stick. It’s a platinum Home Assistant integration and we’ve been working with Phoscon, the company behind deCONZ and Conbee, to add Ingress support to the Hass.io add-on.

Wait... did I just release the deCONZ add-on 4.0 for @home_assistant with Ingress support? 🎉

Thanks to @phosconde for solving the last issues in deCONZ 2.05.72, that allows for this awesomeness! pic.twitter.com/t9aVNdLJEg

— Franck Nijhof (@Frenck) December 19, 2019
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/12/20/all-i-want-is-open-standards/
6 Likes
2

Great news for the open source IOT community’s.
WooHoo! I’m giddy.

1 Like
3

Can someone explain what “Ingress support” means in this context?

2 Likes
4

  1. Has the Home Assistant team considered joining the Apple/Amazon/Google effort? It seems like you all are in a very unique position that could provide valuable insights that might not be on their radar.

  2. Random question: with z-wave going open, would the above group consider adopting it or something similar? Other than current prices, something Z-wave’ish would be my preferred path for device connectivity.

5

That will absorb a hell of a lot of time for the next 3 years (if not more)

Oooh let’s sit on committees, what fun ! :roll_eyes:

6

I believe HA is trying to join.

For it to work it would and should be a new protocol.

7

I’m far more excited about zwave opening than yet another “standard” being developed by cloud companies.

4 Likes
8
1 Like
9

The working group wants an IP solution, so it won’t be z-wave.

10

Then again the Zigbee Alliance is a member.

11

This is a good point :thinking:

12

Zigbee Alliance in it with their DotDot solution, as I read it, not the network protocol. I suspect they want it IP to make it more easy to route data their way.

13

Well it ‘may’ be that they can impose (via a firmware update) ip addressing over z wave, if we have ozw 1.6 we could deploy to accepting devices and be forced to discard the rest.
A win-win for those trying to sell us more kit.

Sorry, how cynical does that sound ? :crazy_face:

14

Appropriately cynical :slight_smile:

15

Is Project Connected Home over IP very different to Web Thing API ?

16

Wow, every single news-item sounds too good to be true in itself, but together some good would have to come from it I guess :stuck_out_tongue:

Is the deconz improvement just for hass.io? I’m running home assistant standalone on my server and lately I get the feeling I’m starting to miss out on functionality instead of just convenience. I don’t think I can switch since the server is used for other stuff as well and docker doesn’t play nice with btrfs.

17

You are right, progress is progress and benefits must surely accrue.

Regarding your HA instance, with a snapshot you can move over to hassio at any time the most that will cost you is : -

  1. A Raspberry Pi 3b (or or could go for a 4b ?)
  2. A microSD memory card (min 32GB)
  3. A decent power supply (and the loss of the socket to plug it in)
  4. A cat 6 cable to hook it up to the network

If you don’t like it, transfer the snapshot back

18

It wouldn’t be too hard to switch to a raspberry pi no (I have a 3b lying unused anyway) but I’d rather keep everything on my server. It’s not a big deal right now and I understand that hass.IO has the main focus, I just worry that other ways of using home assistant don’t get left out by the wayside.

But. I just had a look at what ingress actually means, and it looks like I misinterpreted it initially. If it is really as simple as just having the phoscon interface running inside a tab, then there’s really no issue :stuck_out_tongue: I thought this added a ‘native’ home assistant interface.

19

You can just as easily run Hass.io on non-Pi, including virtual machines. Works great!

I have Hass.io running on a CentOS 7 VM, which leverages docker to roll out hass.io integrations, deConz included. You’ll still need to pass through the conbee
USB interface, which will depend on your VM host’s capabilities, or use “USB Redirector for Linux” (free) to connect your conbee from another machine. I plug the conbee into the physical host (running CentOS 7), running the USB Redirector Server, and have the Hass.io VM run the USB Redirector Client to connect to the host.

I hope this makes sense…

20

Is the Connected Home over IP really going to be open? The only thing I’ve seen is that it’s going to be royalty free, nothing about it’s openness.