201–210 of 241 posts
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I hope they make them quieter this time!
I have non ikea electric blinds. Sure they’re a a little grindy but it’s like 30 seconds two a day.
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I'm curious why you are disgruntled with Philips Hue. They were quite honestly one of my happiest purchases, though I bought them when they were the only programmable color lights available to buy and I would probably get another model today. Was it the dropping of support?
They started requiring an account to use the lights, and support started stating stating that the bulbs will not be usable without an account or the app, with the CTO stating intention to deprecate the local APIs entirely. This flies in the face of why I bought Hue. These are woes I thought I'd be "safe" from when I bought from Philips. I never wanted to create an account or use an app. After spending time setting up…
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Every induction stove I’ve ever used though, was designed by someone who either has never heard of human interface design, or has done and entirely hates the concept of it. Eg, buttons so close to the heating element that they hurt to press Buttons to turn it off that only work when dry, places near where a spill would go. Buttons you have to press up to 10 times just to get it to a reasonable heat. Why does inductio…
LG has built induction models with knobs for years. The touch surfaces are nice but can be difficult for the elderly.
IKEA's Zigbee devices have been some of the more stable smart devices I owned. I wasn't running their hub, opting to run with deCONZ in the past and moving to Zigbee2MQTT in recent years. I do wish the new range would include blinds; the previous generation (FYRTUR) is out of production, and it doesn't seem like there's a replacement yet.
I have never heard of Matter before, but I was super satisfied with Ikea's zigbee products. Does anyone know why they switched?
It’s a newer standard backed by multiple vendors (importantly, Apple, Google and Amazon, who make the devices that you ultimately want to use to control these things). Zigbee is great for communication instead of WiFi, but it’s just one part of the equation - it says nothing about the specific commands a device will respond to. You couldn’t pair a Philips remote with an IKEA lightbulb. Matter attempts to fix it by ac…
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I hope they make them quieter this time!
FYI someone made their own firmware which will drive the motor at a slower speed. Significantly reduces the noise.
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Neither Matter nor Matter-over-Thread require Internet access. We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is. (Historically, IP wins in these conundrums anyway. IP has been succession of grand successes for decades. Resistance is futile. We should work to prepare for the eve…
>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is. What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend? I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provide…
In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling, ...
And a person can also use a one-box solution running OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One is such a box) or Mikrotik's RouterOS (like their succinctly-named L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN).
But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is:
Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. As a part of setting them up, they're walked through a simple process of making an isolated network for those light bulbs.
And we don't seem to be anywhere near there yet.
(And that may seem like a far-reaching goal to some, but similar things have been accomplished in the past. A router from Wal-Mart used to boot up out of the box and Just Work -- while providing a completely unfettered, unencrypted networked named "linksys" or "NETGEAR" for anyone within earshot to participate in.
Things are longer that way these days. Consumer routers have tended to provide secure-by-default wireless networks for a rather long time now. At least in that one little, important aspect of consumer goods, sanity did eventually prevail.)
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I've seen somebody on Reddit using LoRa stuff for the home. The problem with these wifi based sensors is that you eventually run out of IP addresses (yes you could get fancy with subnet setup but still). Another problem is that at some point you might want to swap routers -- I had to swap out a faulty Netgear router, and the re-set was a major PITA. For these reasons I've been moving to Zigbee.
That's why Matter and Thread are IPv6. You don't need IPv4 at all... and if you run out of IPv6 address space, I'd love to see just how many devices/sensors you have in your home.
What might be a problem is the number of devices that can be connected. For example someone who is using an Xfinity Gateway for their WiFi has a limit of 100 devices on each band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz) if they are on an XER10, XB10, or XB8. An XB7 can have 75 on each of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. An XB6 can have 30 on 2.4 GHz and 75 on 5 GHz.
I'm not investing in any smart home products unless: * I can fully control them without the cloud on a non-internet connected network * I can either pay for updates, or they have free updates for at least 12 years, ideally 15 If a hurricane or tornado strikes, or some dictator tries to tell me what I can and can't do, my devices need to remain under my command.
* Multiple VLANs - segregate devices - I usually have two for IoT devices: "THINGS" and "SEWER" * Router/firewall segregation * Home Assistant * etc
So my doorbell has a camera and I run the likes of Frigate or Zoneminder. It is PoE and also has a chime relay. It will still ring if the network goes down.
I am gradually migrating my home light switches to zwave ones. They will still work, regardless of HA being up.
My car (EV) and utility provider (Octopus) and so on are getting complicated and have multiple apps. I have a single Home Assistant box that manages all of that lot.
All of that is quite complicated. I'm an IT consultant with 30 years experience but a novice can go quite far already and it will get better.
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This is, to me, one of the absolute biggest selling points for ZigBee and Z-Wave. I can get some random, vendor I've never heard of, ZigBee sensor, and I know it won't do anything rogue on the internet because it doesn't have any way of getting to the internet. Also, ZigBee is extremely power efficient compared to WiFi. With ZigBee, I don't mind putting a sensor in the crawlspace or somewhere a pain to get to. It won…
Many Matter products are running on Thread, which uses the same radio as Zigbee and has the same power savings. Thread doesn't have accessible IP address. It uses IPv6 and the ULA space which is non-routable.