What’s the Matter with the smart home?
What’s the Matter with the smart home?
From smart homes to folding phones, here’s what we expect to see at the IFA trade show next week.
The article discusses expectations for smart home announcements at the upcoming IFA tech show in Berlin. While companies may unveil new smart speakers, cameras and robot vacuums, the smart home remains fragmented as the Matter interoperability standard has yet to fully deliver on integrating devices. The author argues the industry needs to provide more utility than novelty by allowing different smart devices to work together seamlessly. Examples mentioned include lights notifying users of doorbell activity or a robot vacuum taking on multiple household chores autonomously. Overall, the smart home needs solutions that are essential rather than just novel if consumers are to see the value beyond the initial cool factor.
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The big device manufacturers DON'T WANT INTEROPERABILITY. They want you nailed down to their ecosystem and hit you with planned obsolescence. Like most anything else in the economy, they want premium pricing. If you adopt open standards, then you're competing with everyone else but now on price. The majority of device makers don't want to do that. THAT is the problem with the smart home.
Are there any open source smart home technologies? (For this reason but also for privacy's sake)
Homeassistant helps a lot in that respect.
Home assistant and zigbee/z-wave (also Bluetooth) resolve a lot of issues people have with smart home kit. Matter/Threads, discussed in the article, is supposed to be an open standard to make fancier kit from the big companies work together seamlessly, we just aren't quite there yet.
See:
I've got a few smart home devices (lights, plugs, weed vape, TV backlight) and literally none of it is proprietary and it all works even if my internet connection is down!
Home-Assistant.
People talk a lot about home-assistant but there is another part to that setup; the devices themselves and the firmware they run.
If you stick to ESP8266 devices mostly you can use things like Tasmota and ESPHome. Zigbee/Z-wave is good I've heard but nothing compares to the interoperability of good 'ol WiFi.
It costs like less than $15 for a Sonoff Basic R2, another $5 for a knock off FTDI USB programmer. With a tiny bit of soldering you can put some programming pins on the Sonoff and flash Tasmota. From there you can use Mosquitto to control it, or the HTTP API, both open and interoperable protocols.
Zwave has advantages that go far beyond wifi.
It's a mesh network.
Technology throttled by human greed
We probably have the tech, know-how and capability to build a permanent massive orbiting space station with a highly efficient way to get there and back.
But we're too busy fighting wars and trying to figure out how to screw each other out of another dollar. Most of our human energy and efforts are spent either trying to swindle money out of others or trying to protect ourselves from being swindled or just being swindled.