Received an email today from Mysa stating: “The smart thermostat you love is now available for central heating and cooling systems!”
But it appears to be a WiFi only thermostat and you have to have Mysa account. Basically Mysa bought Zen then, instead of improving it, decided to trash it. Just look at how absurd this “compatibility list” is:
Would not surprise me in the least to learn that Mysa snuck a mic into the thermostat so it can narc on you to them because they want another “revenue stream”.
Thanks for posting about Mysa’s latest product. I was wondering if anyone would make the connection back to Zen ecosystems with this launch.
Mysa Central is a wifi thermostat, and will support Matter over WiFi in a few weeks via OTA once we pass testing.
We plan on developing a factory firmware that can do matter over wifi out of the box, and not require a Mysa app account for provisioning.
There’s no mics or speakers. And it’s pretty clear on our website we don’t sell data, or plan to charge subscription for any of our app features today or in the future.
Mysa didn’t buy Zen ecosystems, we bought the IP after they died as a company. There’s very little shared between the two products other than the industrial design and the HVAC logic. The reason Zen went out of business was being too focused on very niche market segments like zigbee and thread.
I am a power user of smart home products as well, and mainly buy Matter over thread devices. I would love to make a matter over thread line of the mysa products, but that’s not what the broader market wants. It’s shocking to see the data but 90% of people just want a thermostat they can control from their phone.
With all that said, I do think some day we will add thread radios to our thermostats, and I would like to hear from others / market how important it is.
One thing I carefully look for with “smart home” devices is local only control. I have 6 Mysa baseboard thermostats and for they most part* they work locally with Homekit. I was glad to find that.
Will Mysa be allowing this new hardware to be 100% local only?
*If you’re interested, the issues I’ve had are adjustment of the display brightness from Home Assistant (via homekit), and sometimes they don’t reconnect to WiFi without de-powering them. Also, initial HA/Homekit pairing isn’t intuitive. You have to start paring with the Mysa app so they’ll connect to Wi-Fi, and then quit midway through, finishing with HA/Homekit.
Thanks for the feedback @Cake1468. Right now the local control for the brightness settings on Mysa Central HVAC is though the Mysa app. I suppose when we go all the way to make a matter over wifi FW that does not require the Mysa app in anyway way we’ll have to figure out a solution for brightness control either on the device (the new one has actually has a “decent device menu” for adjusting device parameters) or through another local means.
Obviously not as good as 100% local control, but would exposing brightness control and other features via a public API be a suitable solution?
Thanks for hearing it. I look forward to seeing those projects move forward.
Brightness would be nice, but it was more of a confusing thing. I had them blocked from the internet and I they do turn off their screens when I mess with the brightness from HA. However, they won’t turn back on at that point which is really undesirable. I had to give them back internet to control them via the Mysa app to fix the problem. Totally on me for blocking them, but not ideal UX.
I’m sure we could make things happen with a local API. Not my strong point, but there are amazing developers around. I would be stoked with a local app. That said, a native integration is really the AA approach “Works with Home Assistant” is the new cool kids in town kind of thing for a smart home manufacturer. I don’t know the details of that process, but I’m sure it starts with developing the local API.
Thank you for hearing.
P.s. just re-reading “public API”. That’s better than nothing, but if I have a choice between a cloud vs a local based solution, I’ll go local every time. It’s more reliable. Make it optional if you want.
I just came across this and thought back to our conversation here.
I have all the hope in the world that Mysa and iRobot for that matter don’t ever experience bankruptcy and worse, close, but hardware that’s dependant on a specific external server to function is not ideal. Again, reliability concerns.
I do not disagree and would go further in saying that “control from their phone” actually means they just want it to work without needing to think about the administration of it. And because of that they are not concerned/aware of what they are really putting into service.
90% is such a specific number and if you can share I would be interested in knowing what went into producing it.
For me personally, I place a premium on devices with thread radios that do not have some type of “account” dependency (here … take my money) because they are out of band protection for me from mainstream WiFi connected devices:
I do have some WiFi devices but they are segmented into their own vLAN and they cannot access the open Internet. Every time I hear or read about some device that is no longer being supported because of whatever lame excuse that is provided I indulge in a smug chuckle and recall the line in the orginal Twisters movie of “losers … move on!”.
