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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

#211

Post by pkulak »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #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 dif…

> Amazon is choosy on what features you can implement

Allowing someone to holler into an open (or recently broken) window to open my front door sounds terrifying.

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

#212

Post by lioeters »

chriswwweb wrote: post #188

LOL ... there has been a standard for years for smart home devices, it is called KNX ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNX_(standard) ) ... what is wrong with KNX? Hundreds of companies already support it, so why not join them instead of re-inventing the wheel? I think I know what im talking about, because my (smart) home automation is based on KNX, I use Alexa voice commands or a KNX app on my mobile devices to contro…

I enjoyed the description of your home automation setup! I learned about the wide range of sensors and devices that can be incorporated, and that technically it's possible for the owner to programmatically control everything. I can see you're riding the edge of the coming wave.

Looking at the differences between the KNX standard and the "Connected Home over IP" project.. From the latter's home page [0]:

> 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.

This seems like a higher level of abstraction than KNX (unless "smart home devices" in the above description includes the kind of individual sensors you mentioned) - and exclusively focused on using the Internet Protocol.

Reading the Wikipedia article on KNX, it does sound like it has all the elements needed for home automation, including what this new standard aims to achieve.

[0] https://www.connectedhomeip.com/

---

EDIT: Now reading about the ZigBee specs, I find there's a big overlap in protocols/functionality. As a complete newcomer, it's hard to disentangle the pros/cons of these standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee

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

#213

Post by walterbell »

FussyZeus wrote: post #207
pen2l wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming. Wait, what? Please explain more. It feels like you're saying Alexa heard you being ... passionate, and got concerned. But my understanding was that Alexa listens only after the trigger word. I'm really confused by what you've said and wish to know more context.

It's impossible for me to say with certainty if it didn't just interpret something I said as it's trigger. Nevertheless, I was playing Halo online and yelling about a match going badly, saying something to the effect of "we might as well kill ourselves, this match is just not going our way" while laughing, and Alexa interpreted it as me contemplating suicide, and offered to connect me to a crisis line.

Great, now we need another device recording all sounds so we can play then back to reverse engineer smart speaker behavior :(

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

#214

Post by kthejoker2 »

derefr wrote: post #151
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 :)

Sometimes mine starts responding to... nothing. As in, in the midst of silence in the middle of the night, like a dog barking at ghosts, it'll answer a question literally nothing asked.

Relevant

https://youtu.be/J9gUIhkzNDk

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

#215

Post by stefan_ »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #52
melq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because the characteristics of the payload are quite orthogonal to the characteristics of the payload of other smart home devices. how so?

A camera requires orders of magnitude more bandwidth and power than other devices that might be connected over a low-power, low-cost radio network. It needs to transmit that payload 24/7. Currently, home automation typically uses a variety of custom protocols built on IEEE 802.15.4 (not 802.11*). It's a simple protocol that can be implemented by a cheap 8-bit microcontroller from 2 decades ago. Devices from one manuf…

This is a very Hacker News answer, in that you wrote three dense paragraphs that are all technically correct, yet also completely divorced from our practical reality that has smart home cameras in it.

What is the obvious implementation out there? They just have both. They have the cheap 8-bit microcontroller from 2 decades ago transmitting on the low-bandwidth home automation network, and when it is decided that the camera should stream, it wakes up the beefy Ambarella or Socionext SoC to send its video feed over classic WiFi to the vendor cloud, and whoever wants to receive it just gets a stream URL back.

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

#216

Post by blackguardx »

baybal2 wrote: post #177
exikyut wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it also talks about using Thread, which I just learned has the same "must be a member of blahblahblah" restrictions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol) ).

It reminds me of the old "FireWire vs USB." Firewire was an originally open standard, but there came Apple and demanded to exact a symbolic 1$ per device payment. Despite FireWire being an indisputably better standard from technical standpoint, that 1$ completely ruined the mood with OEMs, and they lost the market. USB on the other hand, was not really open, but Intel's central leadership in it guaranteed that there…

Margins on most consumer electronics are extremely small. $1 per device may seem symbolic, but it starts looking like real money at scale.

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

#217

Post by Spivak »

Symmetry wrote: post #170
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.

Yeah! They want you to use the high cost devices manufactured in China.

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

#218

Post by mr__y »

zackmorris wrote: post #176
mr__y wrote: post #72

It would be nice if such standard supported Publisher-Subscriber style of messaging. For example alarm could subscribe to events from motion sensors and security cams (a camera in addition to providing a stream could push events like motion detection) or heating controller could subscribe to temperature change events. To make security of that realistic this would need some form of ACL, probably centrally[0] controlle…

Another thing I'd like to see is a distributed shared state standard (not just for IoT): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_shared_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table The current trend of using async logic via message passing…

How would you solve access permissions in DHT? What if a node in DHT holds data that it is not granted to read? This would imply encryption of the data to prevent unauthorized reads - this does not really seem as a complicated problem - the data could be encrypted with only the nodes granted the read access having the decryption key(s). What seems harder to me is write permissions - if the data is encrypted/signed, only those nodes that have been granted permissions (and thus have copies of keys) would be able to overwrite/change that data. So the node that holds the data would not be able to overwrite it if it does not have r/w access to that piece of data. Nothing prevents from removing this data though. (I'm assuming the possibility of some nodes being malicious)

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

#219

Post by josteink »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #37
josteink wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is that Zigbee works at the lower layers. Zigbee is not IP. It's a completely different network, which is why many Zigbee based solutions often require a hub/gateway (which speaks both IP and Zigbee) to enable control via smart-phone apps or stuff like that. To be honest, I'm pretty happy about that. The less my smart-devices has to do with my local wifi/LAN, the happier I am. Not really sure I lik…

I’ll probably end up firewalling off a zone just for this type of traffic in the future.

But that way they can still report back to the cloud, on top of what their actual function is.

In that regard I much prefer non-IP based devices.

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

#220

Post by mackey »

ahyattdev wrote: post #16
WanderPanda wrote: post #14

I am curious if they will include cameras (security / door), because the characteristics of the payload are quite orthogonal to the characteristics of the payload of other smart home devices.

Since Apple just added support to HomeKit for cameras I am sure this new standard they are making will support them too.

Homekit has had support for cameras for a while. The recent support was for a cloud integration to store video securely.
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