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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

#161

Post by rsync »

amdavidson wrote: post #150
rsync wrote: post #138

We are building a new house right now. All subcontractors know the rules - no "smart" devices or "wifi enabled" appliances or mechanicals. All lightswitches are plain-old hi-voltage only switches. Thermostats are dumb, unprogrammable, with no memory or scheduling or timing. The locks on the doors use physical keys. The smartest thing we have are the sonos speakers and we pug those in with ethernet. Everyone will be p…

Not having programmed schedules on thermostats seems ludicrous to me. I don't have "smart" thermostats, they can only be programmed with the buttons on the front of them and they cannot talk to one another, but how do you turn down the heat when you leave for the day? or even set different temperatures for daytime and nighttime? manually?

We're cheating a bit here because we live in California ... so we don't need AC mechanicals (which is a big win for simplicity) and when we leave the house we simply turn off the heat.

If we lived in Duluth we could probably do the same thing for day-long absences, provided the house was very properly insulated, but you are correct - we would need a timer/schedule on the thermostats for any longer absences.

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

#162

Post by rsync »

nwah1 wrote: post #155
rsync wrote: post #138

We are building a new house right now. All subcontractors know the rules - no "smart" devices or "wifi enabled" appliances or mechanicals. All lightswitches are plain-old hi-voltage only switches. Thermostats are dumb, unprogrammable, with no memory or scheduling or timing. The locks on the doors use physical keys. The smartest thing we have are the sonos speakers and we pug those in with ethernet. Everyone will be p…

Do you not have any mobile devices, or do you rely on 4G? Or do you use the device Edward Snowden recommended to connect your phone to the internet via ethernet cables?

Well, we do have a wifi access point for our single wireless network ... and the only clients that connect to it are actual humans with devices they are using. Nothing to do with mechanicals or appliances or "smart home".

Also, totally unrelated and not really relevant, but we don't have mobile phone service out here ... zero bars of ATT and maybe one bar of VZW, depending on where you stand ...

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

#163

Post by tiniuclx »

H1Supreme wrote: post #17

Why not openthread? It's already there, it's open source, and from my somewhat limited experience, works well.

It looks like Connected Home over IP will be compatible with Thread - they are developing the stack on top of WiFi, Bluetooth and Thread: https://www.connectedhomeip.com/

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

#164

Post by exikyut »

Jonnax wrote: post #44
aequitas wrote: post #20

> 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…

Perhaps. The Phillips Hue lights use an open standard, I bought a usb device that could talk it (ZigBee Light Link) but then it turned out that production devices used a master key. Here's a discussion of the master key being leaked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249753 But I looked it it before that and never tried to look it up again. So likely so, and with today's encryption it probably won't get hacked fo…

> This Tweet from @MayaZigBee has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.

oooooo.

Also, using mobile.twitter.com (as linked) I see a single reply, if I delete `mobile.` I see no replies. Interesting.

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

#165

Post by wtetzner »

weberc2 wrote: post #86
ludamad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

Pretty sure you can change the name she responds to.

It's a limited set of options though, like 'Computer', which is hardly an uncommon word.

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

#166

Post by ogre_codes »

umeshunni wrote: post #148

I hope whatever standard they come up with does not require a home WiFi network to operate. Mobile internet is already faster than your average home internet line and there is an increasing trend where people rely entirely on their mobile phones for network connectivity.

I can't see how going hub less would work. You'd have to configure all the devices to connect to a hotspot on your phone and get your phone to reliably create a wifi network every time you get home. Dealing with multiple users would be a massive headache.

You could have a home wifi network which doesn't connect to the internet. Wifi routers are dirt cheap and don't need to be connected to the internet.

That said, the logistics of this would be super weird because smartphones are mostly designed to treat connected wifi as their internet source. Also, if your devices don't have at least an indirect internet connection you can't do anything remotely which is a pretty big functionality hole.

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

#167

Post by baybal2 »

eunoia wrote: post #140
baybal2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: Homekit requires you to by a DRM chip from Apple to basically do a hanshake with Iphone and nothing else. Not a good idea with OEMs, and that's why I believe they gave up the white flag now: no adoption. They are either jump on the smart home bandwagon now, or never.

It was a hardware auth chip, not DRM and it hasn’t been required for 2 years now. Software auth went live in iOS 11.3. Apple doesn’t encourage the chip anymore and AFAIK no one uses it (except legacy devices obviously). Software auth rules the day.

Well too late now, the boat has sailed.

Most OEMs chose APP + own protocol approach

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

#168

Post by vunie »

If I suspect that there is any chance my family's private information is going to get leaked, then I will not touch it. Appliances should never have internet access. Software updates, if required, should be delivered one-way through open trusted auditable software (something like ofw).

Big tech have already tricked me into supporting them with their "open platform" bait-and-switch before (android), that trick wont work on me twice.

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

#169

Post by aequitas »

weberc2 wrote: post #131
aequitas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BT v1 to v3 maybe, but BTLE/v4 solved a lot of the problems afaik.

You're probably right. It's been a while since I had the misfortune of working with BT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958300

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

#170

Post by Symmetry »

kbumsik wrote: post #112

For someone who thinks Zigbee already is an open standard, well, it is NOT really open though. A standard being publicity available does not always make it open-source friendly. Linux considers it a proprietary protocol [1] so Zigbee driver cannot be part of Linux kernel. Although Zigbee spec allows non-commercial individuals to freely use it, a commercial organization must be a member of the Zigbee Alliance in order…

There's also the bit where Zigbee devices have to share a secret key to talk to each other, mostly to prevent competition from low cost devices manufactured in China.
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