Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.
Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation[1] as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[2]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.
We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.
At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others.
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing.
Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.
There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized.
If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.
(disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)
I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.
Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.
IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other
I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.
Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!
> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.
Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.
One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.
Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
> thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.
> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.
> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.
Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.
Thread is a WiFi replacement, the devices talk IP over thread.
And it has an encrypted pairing process to your vendor controlled hub. Said vendor can allow or disallow it which other vendors may speak with said hub.
Here is the landscape we have:
HomeKit: fully closed, requires certification from Apple. Very expensive and limited functionality.
Zigbee: fully open, anyone can make Zigbee devices and sell them without any restriction. Operates on the same frequency all over the world. Devices are super cheap. You can expand the protocol however you like as a vendor.
Z-wave: fully closed, several incompatible frequencies, requires certification to sell devices.
Thread and matter: semi closed, same ieee standard as Zigbee for data transfer. Vendors can allow it to talk to devices of other vendors. Requires certification. Same price tag as HomeKit, aka 3-4 more expensive than Zigbee.
All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant.
With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life.
It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".
> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.
This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.
> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.
To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!
BLE should also work but you also want a dongle, so hardware wise it’s the same; ideally you also want a couple gateways (Shelly devices can do that out of the box btw, and new Shellies will be supporting Zigbee.)
ZWave is the most stable radio-based standard right now. It's not great, and it's not very extensible, but it's OK-ish. There's one hackable device: https://z-uno.z-wave.me/technical/ but its SDK is not that great.
Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.
And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
> And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).
I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.
> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!
> I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
> Also TIL KNX.
My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.
I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.
> That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
Thanks for this context -- when I searched I only found "thread border routers" -- I couldn't find a router made by a well known brand that included thread functionality -- it always seemed to be "buy a router AND buy a thread border router".
Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
Maybe the answer here is a USB powered device with an extra 2.4Ghz radio (running like.. OpenThread or whatever I need to do thread over an available antenna?) attached to the router?
What I don't understand is why I just use the existing router's 2.4Ghz antenna for this? The amount of confusion in the space and inability of devices to do multiple things is really annoying, to be frank. I can only surmise the reason this stuff is not easy/obvious is profit-incentive (outside of the difficulty of designing good standards of course!).
[EDIT] OK, so the antennas aren't the same, despite being the same frequency -- clearly this is to ensure speedy operation at the hardware level.
So the add-on antenna would probably work if I bought some parts from mouser:
[EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers??? Someone clue me in to the politics/power struggle or whatever the real reason is here.
And then connected + taped something to my router.
> Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
It's worse. There are _no_ new stand-alone Thread Border Routers on the market. You might find old stock of GL.iNet routers, and I believe there were a couple of other experimental devices.
If you want a robust Matter network, your best bet is to use Apple or Google devices as border routers. Or you can use a USB ZigBee stick with HomeAssistant.
> [EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers???
No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication.
Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.
Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation[1] as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[2]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.
We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.
~Paulus Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob
[1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org [2]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...
Is it possible to donate to your foundation via some kind of a subscription?
I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.
At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others.
At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing.
Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
The article does mention https://refoss.net/, quote:
There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized.
If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.
(disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)
> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter.
I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.
Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.
IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other
I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.
Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!
> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.
Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.
One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.
Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
> thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.
> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.
> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.
Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.
Thread is a WiFi replacement, the devices talk IP over thread.
And it has an encrypted pairing process to your vendor controlled hub. Said vendor can allow or disallow it which other vendors may speak with said hub.
Here is the landscape we have: HomeKit: fully closed, requires certification from Apple. Very expensive and limited functionality.
Zigbee: fully open, anyone can make Zigbee devices and sell them without any restriction. Operates on the same frequency all over the world. Devices are super cheap. You can expand the protocol however you like as a vendor.
Z-wave: fully closed, several incompatible frequencies, requires certification to sell devices.
Thread and matter: semi closed, same ieee standard as Zigbee for data transfer. Vendors can allow it to talk to devices of other vendors. Requires certification. Same price tag as HomeKit, aka 3-4 more expensive than Zigbee.
All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life.
It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :)
Thanks again for the rec.
Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use!
Sounds like a far off weekend project
> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".
> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.
This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.
> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.
To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!
BLE should also work but you also want a dongle, so hardware wise it’s the same; ideally you also want a couple gateways (Shelly devices can do that out of the box btw, and new Shellies will be supporting Zigbee.)
You should look into zigbee2mqtt IMHO.
With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.
Wifi yes. Thread depends on the settings on the Thread Border Router. Ours defaults to no internet access.
I’m sure I’m speaking to the choir here but access to Wifi != access to the internet!
Why I’m excited about thread over wifi is that I don’t need any extra specialized gear and possibility one device could run by itself
ZWave is the most stable radio-based standard right now. It's not great, and it's not very extensible, but it's OK-ish. There's one hackable device: https://z-uno.z-wave.me/technical/ but its SDK is not that great.
Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.
And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
> And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).
I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.
> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!
Also TIL KNX.
> I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
> Also TIL KNX.
My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.
I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.
> That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
Thanks for this context -- when I searched I only found "thread border routers" -- I couldn't find a router made by a well known brand that included thread functionality -- it always seemed to be "buy a router AND buy a thread border router".
Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
Maybe the answer here is a USB powered device with an extra 2.4Ghz radio (running like.. OpenThread or whatever I need to do thread over an available antenna?) attached to the router?
What I don't understand is why I just use the existing router's 2.4Ghz antenna for this? The amount of confusion in the space and inability of devices to do multiple things is really annoying, to be frank. I can only surmise the reason this stuff is not easy/obvious is profit-incentive (outside of the difficulty of designing good standards of course!).
[EDIT] OK, so the antennas aren't the same, despite being the same frequency -- clearly this is to ensure speedy operation at the hardware level.
So the add-on antenna would probably work if I bought some parts from mouser:
https://eu.mouser.com/c/passive-components/antennas/?protoco...
[EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers??? Someone clue me in to the politics/power struggle or whatever the real reason is here. And then connected + taped something to my router.
> Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
It's worse. There are _no_ new stand-alone Thread Border Routers on the market. You might find old stock of GL.iNet routers, and I believe there were a couple of other experimental devices.
If you want a robust Matter network, your best bet is to use Apple or Google devices as border routers. Or you can use a USB ZigBee stick with HomeAssistant.
> [EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers???
No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication.
Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
Thanks! Check out Lars' channel for some interesting insights into Home Assistant with remote sensors: https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20a...
A link for the first article in this series:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/
The data ownership reminds me a bit of an early business ummm transaction if Dr Phil:
1. Sell the gullible public long-term memberships to a gym, with long-term subscriptions.
2. Sell the subscriptions to a 3rd party.
3. Close gym. Subscription contract still valid.
https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_sc...