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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

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Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#61
post #56

In the past 10 years, I haven't seen even one Zigbee device sold in retail besides IKEA remote. Zigbee is pretty much a zombie standard now

Just yesterday Aqara (Xiaomi) launched their Amazon storefront. All their devices are Zigbee and had mostly only been available from places like Aliexpress. Zigbee is far from a dead standard.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#62
I hope security is at the top of their list.

I want a super secure hub that everything connects to. The hub is the only thing that speaks to my router. The hub is super secure & doesn't let devices send data back to their manufacturer. If I buy cheap devices off a flea market like Amazon, I want to sleep safe & know that the hub is preventing that device from messing with any other devices or accessing the internet. The hub can send me notifications and I can send it requests. It would be cool if I could choose to have the main hub database & software based in the cloud or on my local network.

Not sure if this is already possible. If it is, I would love to hear more.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#63
> The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

Yet I don't see any mention of making those being able to work completely offline/standalone.

We rely too much on cloud services that ultimately get turned off after an undetermined about of time.

There is no way I am buying home automation equipment I cannot control myself, especially in a situation where the giants like Google could simply decide to terminate my account because I said or did something they didn't like and take down related systems with it.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#64
post #56

In the past 10 years, I haven't seen even one Zigbee device sold in retail besides IKEA remote. Zigbee is pretty much a zombie standard now

I think Zigbee is in the uptick. Philips Hue works with it. Ikea is aggressively pushing products. There is (was? website recently went down, perhaps it has something to do with this announcement) DotDot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee#Cluster_Library) based on Thread. Which is used by Nest/Google.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume the average person has no clue what Zigbee is. I know I'd never heard of it

From what I’ve read, Zigbee is for the rest of the world what Z-Wave is for the US, in terms of market share. Not sure how accurate that is, but from what I’ve seen, there are a lot more Zigbee devices here in Germany than Z-Wave, while most US sites talk about Z-Wave.

What Zigbee devices can you buy apart from Hue lamps? ZWave has been dominant for many years because there are hardly any Zigbee devices, be it in the US or in the EU. FWIW I'm in the Netherlands and have all ZWave, and when you look at e.g. the symcon.de forums, there are plenty of ZWave users in the EU (and Germany specifically).

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#66
post #58
post #56

In the past 10 years, I haven't seen even one Zigbee device sold in retail besides IKEA remote. Zigbee is pretty much a zombie standard now

Zigbee is used all the time in smart lights, plugs, doorbells, temperature sensors and the such. It's a very popular standard.

I personally have seen more Z-Wave devices than Zigbee in the wild.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#67
post #55

> The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers... > The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol and increase compatibility for consumers. Curious if I as a hobbyist will benefit from this? Or if this will become a: it works perfectly, but only if all your devices connect to ou…

I really hope they recognize the need that people want to keep their data on their lan. Actually that would be required by the GDPR if they won't let me sign anything. My derived data is my own people, it does not belong to who ever collects it. I.e. I just want a thermostat the is a big rotating button and speaks mqtt. It does not exist. If you want it to look good you end up with a Nest thermostat. Home Assistant n…

If your device supports opentherm (which is not as open as you might think, btw) you might want to look into OTGW [0]. It probably works with Nest to if the Nest allows to run without internet at all.

[0] http://otgw.tclcode.com/

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#68
post #50

> The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers... > The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol and increase compatibility for consumers. Curious if I as a hobbyist will benefit from this? Or if this will become a: it works perfectly, but only if all your devices connect to ou…

My guess: first of all, "for security reasons" your DIY device will need to be certified, any existing SBCs will need to be replaced/extended to support new type of network and due to bloated protocol specs with a myriad of abstraction levels will render it almost impossible to implement it on your own and the open source library that can do that will implement the standard as specified whereas all proprietary soluti…

Believe me, they will it will never find adoption. How to say, they are free to make whatever standards, but they will not matter much if nobody will use them.

Their entire ecosystem together have less devices shipped than even some OEM nonames, not to say of Xiaomi or Huawei or Tuya who tower over them.

All kinds of "smart assistants" like Alexa end up in drawers very quickly after initial novelty passes, and it creeping up you in the middle of a conversation gets annoying. From data I have, sales of those smart speakers is already starting to taper off.

In Russia, there is an idiom "to divide the cake before it's baked." And those guys are doing exactly that: people don't even know what those "connected home" devices are and which ones sell well, yet they are already eager make up standards for them.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#69
post #2

FYI: This is the project's official homepage: https://www.connectedhomeip.com

Trivia: I had never seen this Apple logo used before, looks like the name of the company using a San Francisco font.

I wonder if it's official or just a workaround due to the fact that all the other logos have names and not just an icon like the standard Apple logo.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#70

Zigbee is already an open standard, but some Zigbee devices don't work with others. Yet, with Z-Wave they all tend to work and there isn't that much of a price difference (between Zigbee and Z-Wave devices). The biggest problem with Zigbee is that is uses 2.4 GHZ which doesn't travel long distances or through walls very well. Z-Wave uses a lower frequency that does. (edited for clarity)

Zigbee can use sub-GHz as well.

Oh, I did not realize that. Are there any implementations that actually use that?
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