Howdy! I’ve been thinking about this post for ages now. It feels like I should be able to find the answer easily but the more I look, the more confused I become.
The question I’m asking, what should I do with my zigbee network now that HUE is getting the matter update.
My configuration is;
Sonoff dongle plus
88 zigbee devices - mix of everything I could get my hands on. A lot of hue, LUMI, innr, …
ZHA
I haven’t used my HUE hub in years but now a couple of things bother me.
HUE gets it’s update to matter. Should I go on this train? That would mean install that hub again and migrate my network to that hub? But a lot of devices can’t migrate to HUE, so I’ll end up having 2 seperate networks.
None of my devices ever get updates. I remember when they where installed via the HUE hub they would get an update every now and then.
IMHO matter is still early adopter tech and there’s still some big swipes to get right before it’s good enough for me to recommend for general deployment. I figure by 1.3 they should have most of my beef sorted out. (I hope)
That means if my stuff works. I’m not changing ANYTHING.
AFAIK Phlips will update the Hue Hub to Matter over Wifi.
The bulbs will still just be Zigbee and the Hue Hub will still use their version of Zigbee to communicate with the bulbs.
The only thing you will gain by using the hub is to allow more controllers to control the hub, but this is already possible.
What you might lose is the many extra features the hub and maybe also running with “pure” Zigbee give you, because Matter is extremely strict with what is allowed. One example is smart plugs with monitoring, like the Eve smart plugs. Eve smart plugs can run Matter now, but the monitoring is not possible to use over Matter, because it is not allowed, so you need to use another type of connection to get that information.
Looking into the ‘future’ you will probably find devices that only run on a Matter network. There are two kinds of Matter devices those that run on your existing WiFi network and those that will run on the new Thread network. If the device runs on the Thread network, you will need to add a Thread ‘border router’ of some kind, basically another hub from some vendor. The new dongle that Home Assistant is selling in combination with added the Home Assistant Matter support to your HA server would do this I believe, or device such as one of the newer Apple TV’s would do this as well. But as is stated here, Matter is pretty new and needs some time to mature. I think you will be hard pressed to find a device you ‘need’ in the next year or two that you could not find in a Zigbee or WiFi form. The concept of Matter is a good one, local only control and and ability to be added to any home hub (HA, Apple, Google, Amazon or combos of these) that support Matter. You will still need to be watchful that vendors are not sending your data out to cloud some how for their benefit.
To you existing Zigbee setup, the best rule for home automation stuff is ‘if it is working, don’t change it’. A hard one for us ‘techies’ to follow, there is always some new and cool .
The only exception to the don’t change it rule for what read you saying about your setup is the firmware upgrade to Zigbee devices. And this is an edge case, that from my experience for my setups has only been needed a very few times. That said, not having the ability is unfortunate. Over my too many years of messing around with Zigbee, I can cite only one ‘have to have’ upgrade to a Zigbee device that I owned. That was Hue added the ability to let you set how there light bulbs turned on after power cycle of the bulb. Other than that, I have had one sonoff switch type that came with a flaw in it’s firmware from the get go that required a firmware upgrade.
Unfortunately, ZHA is pretty far behind in it’s implementation of a component to do device firmware upgrades. I moved all of my zigbee to Zigbee2MQTT about a year ago, so I can not speak to ZHA’s progress since then. However, from what I read on these forums, it is still not ‘there’.
I find the amount of work being done by the Zigbee2MQTT developers far exceeds that that is being done on ZHA, including the area of firmware upgrade ability. If you were going to do any change, I would recommend bringing up a parallel Zigbee2MQTT system and ‘at the right pace’ move all of your zigbee devices over to Zigbee2MQTT. However, again, if you system is working solidly… remember ‘the rule’
Good hunting!
Hue devices do not get updates very often, here is the firmware history (notice some firmware are only applicable to certain hardware). Some of my bulbs are running the latest version from november 22 for example. Philips Hue Support - Release Notes Lamps | Philips Hue US
For a device that is running a pretty small footprint firmware on a pretty limited protocol, like Zigbee, I would say Hue devices actually get a lot of updates.
Many of the updates Hue devices get would be lumped together with bigger updates at other vendors and sometimes those bigger updates can come years apart.
I have my Hue devices listed, so I can see when there is updates and I have had several updates this year already.
Thanks for raising this thread - it’s a question I have been pondering also.
The main reason for considering a change is reliability of control. Philips Hue Hub never failed me via their native app.
2 years ago I Integrating al 44 of the Zigbee devices directly into the HA with ZHA via a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus.
Quite often a light or sensor will fall off the Zigbee network (even with a working zigbee device a couple of feet away)… subsequently HA gets quite a bit of stick and eye rolls by the family when this happens… and appeals for “Lets get hue back!”.
Hence considering the options the OP raises.
Reading this thread, maybe ZHA is one mistake and moving over to Zigbee2MQTT would be a step forward for reliability? Matter does not seem to be any help for my case so far - but will be keeping a close watch.
Plan B is to move back to the Hue Hub and integrate that into HA. The experience I had with this previously, was when Philips/HA integration breaks (which it did occasionally) all zigbee devices break.
This is my main credibility issue with HA in my home and needs a fix.
No first hand experience with ZHA myself, but I’ve used Zigbee2MQTT for some years now and I have never had any mains powered device drop off the network. Only thing dropping of here is when battery powered devices runs out of battery (and then I get a notification).
This is exactly what I’m contemplating. Thanks for the input to the others who reacted!
My feeling that ZHA is less stable compared to standard HUE hub and Zigbee2MQTT seems to be correct. So switching to Zigbee2MQTT seems a possible solution.
Just for testing purposes I’ve been polling to my devices on a regular basis via node-red. That does give some interesting results I must say!
Some devices are shown as unavailable while the weren’t and other the other way around.
Hue is a ‘walled garden’ with a very limited, vetted and controlled selection of devices. And when your light bulb selling price point is like 80 USD, you can afford the developer resources. I’m not sure some of the other ‘walled gardens’ with device price points in the sub USD 10 have the same. Ikea is an anomaly in this ‘walled garden’ model, in that I am thinking their zigbee products are ‘loss leaders’ for selling a lot of meatballs
IHMO, the two things that create a solid system, a very controlled environment like Hue or a open source environment (within the limits that zigbee private parts allow) with a large number of passionate developers and testers (aka users).
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