Chip / Matter support (including Thread)

Feature Requests
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Other definitions are about information being publicly available and maintained collaborative with open processes and/or possibility for royalty-free implementations. See example ITU-T and IETF definitions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#IETF_definition

That depends if gain access to the specifications or not without paying. I know that zigpy and the ZHA integration in Home Assistant was developed from the official Zigbee specifications without reverse engineering. And I also believe that the same goes for zigbee-herdsman and Zigbee2MQTT as well. How the developers of those implementation gained access to the needed official Zigbee specification documentation I do not know, (maybe through their work, maybe through leaks, or other method?).

Then why are you here discussion this. Are you trolling? Please just don’t post if you are not interested!

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Yep, information like, you know, the standard specification.

Open standards don’t have to rely on leaks for third party implementations.

Anyway, I won’t reply to any of your posts anymore. It’s a waste of time and we’re filling this thread with OT talk about the definition of the term ‘open’.

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44

I really suggest people watch the video they put out which answers MANY of the questions being asked here, and the contributors to the video are Samsung, Google, Apple, Amazon, Hue etc - they are all pretty clear in their intentions.

There are 2 videos to watch, the first BEFORE they rebrand and the second announcing the rebrand.

Before rebrand - all about CHIP: The Future of IoT is Now: Project Connected Home over IP - YouTube
Announcing rebrand: Brand Announcement - Connectivity Standards Alliance & Matter - YouTube (and with the various technology companies I mentioned - answering questions)

I haven’t watched the newer videos they have just posted in the last few days yet.

Andy

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The first version of the spec has NO cloud requirement. The whole point of Matter is that it is LOCAL control. No third party cloud needed.

In any case, considering the sheer number of players involved with Matter - I don’t think bypassing it will be an option for you. Even Samsung Smart Things will support Matter, and indeed the v3 hub has a Thread radio on board.

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46

No cloud requirement doesn’t mean that it won’t have indirect internet connectivity. It’s IP routeable for a reason. It’s going to be included into pretty much any voice assistant there is. And those have cloud requirements. Matter is designed for mass market products, targeted at consumers who want zero effort setup and use. It would be pretty naive to think that Amazon and Google would put any money into this standard for purely altruistic reasons.

I wouldn’t worry about that :wink: Between the sheer amount of non-routeable zwave and Zigbee devices and entirely DIY ones, I will have plenty of possibilities to avoid it.

47

I opened a feature request on the OpenHAB for this
 pun intended
matter. We open source smart hub softwares should stick together:)

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48

I’m always enthusiastic about technology releases where the first person to speak is the marketing director and the slides use words like “robust” and “market-proven.”
All joking aside, I’m really quite interested in seeing what they do and I’m seasoned enough to expect that some parts of this alliance may not be as allied as they seem at present. I also sincerely hope they don’t live down to my expectations. I wouldn’t mind being wrong when it comes to this.

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No and that is entirely the whole point. It costs manufacturers time and money to set up a cloud infrastructure to allow remote control of the devices they make. And that of course also means that there is a security risk too, and should the service be breached, they will be fined in multiple countries.

Allowing local control, and relying on whatever voice activated ecosystem the end user is using, to manage the remote access aspect of controlling the device, removes a massive amount of complexity from the manufacturer. It also means that they don’t have to muck about with OAuth linking to the many different ecosystems either, and then staying up to date with the latest developer guidelines for each of them.

They create a product, certify it for matter - and their job is done, it is not their worry about how the end user will connect to it. That is a massive selling point for matter to the manufacturer.

Then we look at who is actually involved in the matter standard -

ALL the major semi conductor providers are involved, ZWave Europe is involved, Xiaomi and Wyze, Tuya, TV/set top box manufacturers, iRobot, Espressif (who are obviously responsible for the ESP chips), EDF (An electricity company), D-Link, Control4 AND Creston (that’s massive news), Alarmcom and ADT.

It’s pretty clear that matter is going to big, and why wouldn’t it be, there are 2 things that are certainties:

  1. Constantly having to create proprietary systems is time consuming, buggy, a security headache and expensive.
  2. The only way the smart home market is ever going to reach the forecasts that people keep making - is if this mess of products that don’t work together, or don’t work well together - is done away with. As long as stuff is proprietary and probably more importantly: expensive. The longer it the smart home market will stay being the play thing of a very small sector of the population.

In short, it’s their interest to standardise. If they don’t - the market will remain small for a long time, and then someone will invent a new technology that is better than what exists, and people will flock to it, leaving Zigbee and ZWave in the dust - and it will be too late for them to catch up.

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50

I’m going on the basis I outlined in my response to the other guy. But in short:

The smart home market knows - if they don’t standardize, no-one is going to be a winner here. The market will remain small, and expensive. The only way to reach the size of market they are forecasting, is if the consumer doesn’t have to worry whether stuff will work together AND if the consumer is not paying a ridiculous premium for stuff. It’s interesting seeing just how many companies are on the list for matter though -
https://buildwithmatter.com/ scroll right to the bottom of the page and click on “see full list”

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51

You completely missed my point. But that’s OK. I wish you best of luck with your future Matter devices. Hopefully you’ll still be happy with them when the marketing shine wears of.

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In case you missed it -
ALL the companies that sell smart speakers, ALSO sell hardware that works with those (and sometimes other) smart speakers. So no - they are obviously not in it for purely altruistic reasons. BUT that doesn’t necessarily mean they are also harvesting your smart home data.
I mean obviously I only have their word for it - but Google as an example, reiterated at this years IO2021 that they very specifically do not use any of the homegraph data for advertising purposes.

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Here’s how I expect it will work out: The specifications only require that the border routers be compliant. You can use whatever protocols within your own little system as might suit you. So, like Philips has already signaled, you’ll need a Hue hub to control your Hue lights, but the hub will connect as a border router and allow control from outside that box. Will Matter have the same degree of control that the proprietary app that controls through the hub does. I don’t know. I have doubts.
That said, the problem with predicting the future is that only hindsight is 20/20.
In a year or so, we’ll be able to see how it’s panning out. I sure hope your optimism is rewarded and my pessimism becomes resident on the ash-heap of history. I doubt I’ll ever be happier saying I botched a prediction.
However, even if several companies act in the usual, short-sighted way, Matter/CHIP still has some merits that make the products worth looking at, especially with something like HomeAssistant to manage them all together in spite of that.

54

a simple solution:
just block internet access for devices you dont trust.
I have made that too with my tv. I dont need internet access for watching tv, and i dont need spys in my home
Did you allready block your TV?

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Well, in the case of Matter that would be the edge router / hub, so in most cases the voice assistants or smart speakers. That would make them fancy door stops. Matter targets the type of consumer experience where the entire smart home is built around and upon Amazon’s, Google’s or Apple’s assistant ecosystems. And those won’t work without the cloud. Not that the typical user of such a setup would care anyway.

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I dont understand whats the problem. Even in the case of matter the edge router could be your HA-hardware in addition to a bluetuooth/wifi/thread usb-dongle. It doesnt matter if you use, Alexa, Rhasspy or simple Buttons in the UI

No, because there are people around there, that dont have the patience, desire, time or skills to build their own SmartHome.
For the same reason people buy an expensive Synology. They want to gain easy! access to a safe and private storage. And for the same reason people will buy an HomePod.

where is that written? just a submission

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Uhm, an Amazon Echo without internet access is a fancy door stop. The kind of people who don’t have the patience, interest or technical skills to setup a well researched local and privacy driven smart home are usually the ones who just buy an Echo/GoogleHome/whatever and expect anything to just work with it, oblivious or just fully uninterested in any privacy matters.

Anyway, I feel there are some major miscommunication issues here. Maybe I’m just not enable to get my point across in the right way, I don’t know. As far as I see it, this whole CHIP/Matter thing is the exact opposite of what HA stands for. Lots of hype, weasel words and marketing blubb around what essentially boils down to a closed proprietary protocol hidden behind paywalls and NDAs, entirely controlled by the three big ones, designed to push people into their data driven ecosystems under the guise of “open standards”, interoperability (especially with their spy devices voice assistants) and pseudo-local control.

Maybe I’m wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. I hope I am. Let’s see how things will look like when the first devices become widely available, the marketing hype settles and reality starts to kick in.

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I’m just going to respond to one point you raise.

It’s entirely possible that it COULD turn out that way, but in the video where they announce the rebrand, and in the previous video where they talk about the CHIP standard. They make it clear that it will be a royalty free, and open standard (hence developing it in the open on Github).

As for data privacy - Amazon say in the rebrand video that their aim is for people to be able to speak to the smart speakers LESS (ie the smart home should actually be smart, rather than requiring the user to tell it what to do). And each generation of Google speaker is able to do more and more processing on-device without requiring the cloud at all. I can’t comment on Apple because I have no experience in it.

What the vision would be though for the matter standard - would be this:
right now integrations need to be written for Home Assistant to support all manner of devices and other hubs. SmartThings as an example is definitely getting upgraded to support Matter, so the SmartThings integration could be done away with. v1 of the spec includes TVs - so if matter were supported in Home Assistant, then it would natively gain the ability to control TVs of different brands (as they get updated to support matter) again with no need for integrations being needed for each different brand. We know that Hue is getting updated to support matter, so again no integration would be needed for Home Assistant.

So if we ignore the voice assistant side of things for a moment, you can already see what sort of benefit it would have just to Home Assistant. Home Assistant would not necessarily need to be fully matter either - matter supports something they call “multi-admin” which means that where the end user is currently locked in to the ecosystem they have chosen, matter enables them to use multiple ecosystems and apps to control the same devices - so instead of having to factory reset stuff to test how they perform on a different ecosystem (or just to use a different control app) - they simply start using the new ecosystem (or app). Home Assistant would be better as an admin interface rather than exposing everything connected to it as matter compatible devices.

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59

Well yes, all that sounds like a great home automation utopia. Then again, it’s hard to draw the line between marketing and actual down to earth reality here. I think we all need to wait and see how things turn out. Hopefully for the best. Right now, there’s a little bit too much of the ‘Amazon said this, Google promised that’. I mean sure, it sounds good on paper - but you’ll have to bear with my skepticism with that coming from companies that literally live on selling consumer data.

And just one thing again about the open aspect (sorry). I know I already mentioned that, but I really hate the way that they abuse this term for marketing purposes. I don’t know if you’re a developer yourself, this might not be entirely clear to non-developers: an open reference implementation doesn’t mean anything. The thing that matters is an open specification. That’s all you need to implement your own stuff. A reference implementation is entirely optional. It’s nice to have, just in case there’s something that isn’t entirely clear in the standard, you can go and check in the code. But it’s not really needed.

It doesn’t work the other way round though. Having only a reference implementation without the specifications is a royally huge pain in the ass. Excuse my language. You will have to essentially reverse engineer the entire code. And even then, there will be things that won’t work as expected, because code can sometimes be cryptic and ambiguous. Or copy and paste their stuff as a black box and awkwardly interface it with your own. If they really wanted to be open, they would release the specifications (and maybe make people pay for a good reference implementation).

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60

Nanoleaf just released the “Elements” Hexagons and announced that the controllers will get a software update that turns them into Thread Border Routers
 I’ll give it a go.