Silicon Labs has entered an official partnership with Nabu Casa to offer support for our open-source and hardware efforts.
Silicon Labs is the company behind Z-Wave and designs chips for Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread, and more standards. Their chips provide connectivity to many devices, including Philips Hue, Ring, IKEA TRÅDFRI, and our own Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect products. In fact, every Z-Wave chip in a Z-Wave product ever made came from Silicon Labs.
We love open standards because they live up to our Open Home values for the smart home: privacy, choice, and sustainability. This is why Nabu Casa, with the revenue received from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, invests heavily in integrating these open standards, which involves working on a daily basis with Silicon Labs technologies. For example, we employ Dominic to work full-time on Z-Wave JS and Nikita to work full-time on Zigpy, the library powering Zigbee in Home Assistant. Other developers are dedicated to making sure the Silicon Labs chips inside our own hardware work perfectly in Home Assistant.
Z-Wave JS is the only open-source implementation of Z-Wave, powering an increasing number of Z-Wave platforms beyond Home Assistant. Our work is fundamental to the growth of the Z-Wave ecosystem, and we are happy to see this get acknowledged by Silicon Labs with this partnership. With Home Assistant, we are exposed to many different devices running Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread. And as a partner, we are now able to collaborate with Silicon Labs to report bugs and get our issues fixed with priority.
It’s still not very clear to me what the mutual agreements are of the partnership.
Has Silicon Labs promised to help with fixing bugs in exchange for the bug reports and the associated user data?
Will Nabu Casa spend time and money testing Zigbee and Zwave devices for Silicon Labs?
Or more general: are there any contractual or financial obligation from one or both sides?
I’d guess it means they have more direct communication between the dev teams to allow trusted contacts to share issues. Kind of like the “direct phone line” idea between two countries’ presidents.
Any chance of getting Silicon Labs to help with sponsorship CSA’s Certification Transfer Program for Zigbee 3.0 certification of Home Assistent Yellow and Home Assistant Green with Home Assistant SkyConnect as a certified Zigbee gateway components when using the ZHA integration as certified Zigbee gateway “software component” products?
Maybe now that Silicon Labs has partnered with Nabu Casa they as a company could try getting Silabs to sponsor Nabu Casa’s employees or consultants time for a Zigbee 3.0 certification project and time at Authorized Test Service Providers to help Validate Certification Eligibility?
Have recently seen that Nabu Casa / Home Assistant developers are already working on their plan for certifying its Z-Wave solution, so a related tip is that the zwave-js organization on GitHub project has a project (kanban-board) with roadmap and backlog tracking tasks needed to be implemented or changed before they can go through the Z-Wave Certification Program:
Previously read that not only has Nabu Casa joined the CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) as a member but also made it more or less clear that Nabu Casa also has an ultimate goal of eventually certifying Home Assistant’s Matter integration as a 100% compatible Matter controller.
So happy to see this! I have an almost exclusive ZWave network and ZWave integration with HA has improved so much over the years, making a huge leap when ZWave JS came out. Happy my cloud sub is going to great partnerships like this.
Nice !!! I have a lot of devices and they are only Z wave because for me it’s the most robust and reliable system for the moment. This partnership can make it even better !!! Great news !!
Do you think that Silicon Labs could maybe help lobby companies making Z-Wave and Zigbee devices with their chips to publish unencrypted OTA (Over-The-Air) update firmware images and provide download URLs on public servers so that third parties can download official OTAU images? …perhaps also assist in unifying the OTAU firmware update experience between Z-Wave and Zigbee devices as well as Matter in the future? Today the Z-Wave and Zigbee integrations uses different methods and UI approaches:
Not sure what the status is today in regards to OTAU providers of Z-Wave firmware images, but for Zigbee it is sadly just IKEA, LEDVANCE/OSRAM, SALUS/Computime, INOVELLI, Sonoff/ITead, THIRDREALITY that are among the few companies that provide official unencrypted Zigbee OTA upgrade image files available via public servers and is supported in the ZHA integration → https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/blob/c0bd9235d188231af5d19e9c3e31a4182701b2c0/zigpy/ota/OTA_URLs.md
Home Assistant’s Z-Wave (Z-Wave JS) developers previously made it easier for users:
