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

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141–150 of 364 posts

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

#141
I bought a home and the previous owner used Z-Wave for everything. The whole thing worked irregardless of internet working or not. Whatever they invent if it is useless without internet access its a step back from something that has already worked.

All my home automation / smart home integrations will have to be Z Wave compatible or I will not use it. If my internet goes out will all my things be useless without it?

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

#142
post #68
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cre…

I thought the russian idiom was something about splitting the hide before youve shot the bear.

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

#144
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…

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

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

#145
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, Amazon, and Google are fundamentally opposed to a model that sells devices that don’t phone home - their whole purpose is to capture value by creating lock-in for surveillable hosted services

This is not exactly the case for HomeKit. Apple didn't even add the ability to control devices when you are off your home network until recently.

Seconded. Apple, Amazon and Google have very different goals for your data. This is just a transport layer. Your privacy from the mother company isn’t impacted by the transport layer, but rather where they put the “brains” of your smart home.

While all using the same transport layer they can continue to utilize different “brain” strategies.

Apple’s “brain” has always been in your home where your data belongs and should stay. Google started with the cloud but is moving towards the same model.

On the other hand Amazon seems to have no qualms slurping everything out of your home to their servers and no plans to change.

The more you know.

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

#146
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…

Don't you think delusional is a bit strong... There is a real company, nabu casa, hiring real developers to work on making a 1.0 release that's easy for others to use. Yeah right now it's complicated, but check out some of the projects they're working on like stanford's almond integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focuse...

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

#147
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My central heater is a simple on/off model. Nest will work offline with it but afaik you can't write target temperatures to it then.

To bad, my old heater had opentherm, with the OTGW I could intercept the packets between the heater and thermostat, change values (eg: date/time), issue commands (set room temperature) and add missing functionality (outside temperature for heating curve), it was ideal in every way. But I moved and my current heater has a proprietary protocol over rs485 so its a no-go for the OTGW.

In the EU there are no systems without opentherm by law luckily.

That does mean some systems are not available at all, so "luckily".

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

#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.

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

#149
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Looking at amazon.de, I see switches, dimmers, thermostats, plugs, motion/humidity/pressure sensor and of course lights.

And Google Trends has zigbee far higher up than z-wave for google trends in Germany [0] vs USA [1}

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=DE&q=zigbee,z-w...

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=zigbee,z-w...

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

#150
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?

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