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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

#191
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

The vast majority of budget devices I have found are ZigBee:

- Philips Hue

- Xiaomi

- IKEA

- Sonoff

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

#192

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 think it is the other way around. If you want to have your connected devices in a reasonable safe setup, create a wifi network for them and you decide if and how they connect to the internet. This could be a mobile uplink, if you desire to, but I really wouldn't like each device on its own have an internet connection I cannot control.

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

#193
post #28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I can say my smarthome is relatively secure is because I don't allow any of the devices to access the internet. IP or not seems irrelevant.

I think any home automation system should not have to rely on the home owner having a CCNA cert in order to be secure.

Buying a Wifi router and not plugging it to the Internet doesn't require a CCNA cert.

Yes, it's an extra device, but so is the Zigbee hub.

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

#194
post #144
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least for the ecobee, hass can add it as a local homekit device

Yeah I hope ecobee gets to Europe before I get a nest :)

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

#195
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I can say my smarthome is relatively secure is because I don't allow any of the devices to access the internet. IP or not seems irrelevant.

The high level of sophistication of IP networking and the fact that one small mistake could mean your devices access the Internet is why a network that doesn't talk IP is almost inherently safer than one that does.

There's no sophistication: just plug a Wifi router to an outlet but not to the Internet cable.

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

#196
Hmmm. Now what am I going to do with my laboriously (and lovingly) put together zigbee2mqtt/HomeKit setup? :)

Seriously now, I see this as a good thing, if only because we're likely to get an interoperability stamp of approval of some kind.

Right now, and were it not for my using an Open Source solution for my Zigbee gateway, it would be impossible for me to hook up Hue, Xiaomi, IKEA and other devices to Homekit without a bunch of different gateways (because some Zigbee endpoints simply refuse to talk to anything other than their own peers).

I also hope that they manage to do this without going the Google way of having everything open up ports on your router (some of the newer Nest-branded stuff already knows how to talk to peers on a LAN, but the security model for Google/Alexa integrations is fundamentally broken for me - WeMo support excluded).

So far HomeKit can run _completely_ on-premises, with all devices interacting on the LAN, which is great (except for remote connections through the Home app to your Apple TV home hub, and Siri voice recognition to trigger scenes), and that is why I decided to stick with it.

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

#197
post #91
post #71

Can anyone recommend a method* without Wifi? Isn't there a method for "smart outlets", main scheduler, etc over electrical lines rather than bluetooth, wifi, etc? Method* == standard, or product line. [yes i used pointer and equality symbols oddly] Edit: basically looking for a way to avoid more wireless transmitters in the house. Or are all outlets "receive only"?

The previous generation of smart home devices was called X10, and it used signals over power lines. I gather it was: - slow - might have required you to make a connection in your circuit breaker - and was designed in the 1970s, when home electrical systems weren't very noisy (apparently all the switching power adapters we have today make a ton of noise and make it hard for the signal). I don't see why something newer…

To expand on the circuit breaker item above: Because most of the outlets in your home are split between two phases of AC, it meant that the X10 transmitter would only be able to talk to half your power outlets (and you didn't know which half ahead of time), unless a phase coupler was wired into your breaker box that would repeat the signal on the outlets connected to the other phase.

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

#198
post #129

As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the market, and prevent non-local, privacy-honoring options from continuing to be manufactured. If average consumers are told to simply "look for the CHIP logo", and the CHIP standard includes facilities for must-phone-home messages akin to streaming DRM, I'm afraid…

I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not…

They are actively working to make Home Assistant much more user-friendly. I suggest watching the "state of the union" presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc17q1Zn0Xs

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

#199
10 years in the trenches here.

Apple’s smart home protocol famously does not support multiple users. Amazon is choosy on what features you can implement (turn on alarms but not turning them off, locking doors but not unlocking them). Google loves using radio hardware no one else supports. Zigbee has delightful legacy security vulnerabilities and consortium drama.

I look forward to these groups putting aside their differences, coming together, and creating a new standard that combines the best of all these anti-patterns.

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

#200
post #60

> 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…

Apple's existing standard (HomeKit) is relatively 'open' - the specification is published, and several open source implementations exist. I've used the Python one to implement automation on the smart-home devices I've built myself. However, you do need to be certified to distribute a product otherwise you get a warning in the app when you add the device. This seems like a fair compromise to me.

A self-plug for my own HAP C library: https://github.com/andoma/libhap

I've been using it on a Raspberry Pi to control various things and recently decided to shape it up and release it to the public.

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