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IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

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Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#221

Post by happymellon »

oritron wrote: post #192
Fwirt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been spending hours the past couple weeks "ensmartening" my home with IoT switches and power outlets. Home Assistant is gorgeous and is an absolute feat of engineering and a testament to the power of open source, but messing with it you can tell that it's very much "by nerds, for nerds". I don't expect my wife to learn to edit YAML files so she can customize a dashboard. The drag and drop editor mostly works b…

There are also Tuya zigbee devices and people have hacked local control of Tuya wifi bulbs to varying degrees. My best stuff is IKEA: their battery powered devices use AAA so I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s, and they make the only inexpensive Zigbee buttons I've seen that don't include a double-click (Rodret, not the very similar Somrig). The benefit there is commands are n…

> I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s

I just switched to LIR2032s rather than replacing devices.

Exactly the same but rechargeable, and there isn't a ton of waste.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#222

Post by torginus »

close04 wrote: post #200
torginus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Zigbee also defines a control layers, so there's such a thing as a standard switch or power meter, or thermostat which can be controlled by any generic piece of software. A lot of devices are not compliant though and either have extra functionality exposed in a nonstandard way, or don't comform to the standard well enough. So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss regardless of vendor but…

> A lot of devices are not compliant though That's exactly the problem, there was no standard protocol for communication over Zigbee. Manufacturers could implement whatever they wanted on top of it and put the Zigbee logo, like you can put the WiFi logo on a device that speaks a proprietary protocol over WiFi. You bought into an ecosystem and if you wanted a device from outside of it, you needed another hub. > So you…

I guess I got into smart homes quite late, and have the benefit of accumulated knowledge and got to skip out on decades of half-working devices.

Nowadays, from what I've seen, Zigbee devices seem to be based on a couple of good ICs (and software stacks), which are inexpensive and battle tested.

Forgive me, I don't have a comprehensive experience on what standard does exactly what and how, but from what I've read Matter is a no go for homemade stuff - you need to go through cert for the hubs to talk to you.

As for out of the box support, I've read mixed things - I've heard that for many devices that are Matter compatible (more particularly, the Aqara W100 thermostat), you can't do everything the device supports via Matter that you can do with more proprietary APIs. Considering many of these companies are pushing their own ecosystems, they have an incentive to keep an advantage. Many people are already going for using Thread without Matter.

I feel like Matter is like the joke where they try to solve N competing standards by adding another one, and experience shows this isnt the way to go. The way to go is what Home Assistant does - they keep an open ecosystem with support for plugins, and for example for Zigbee, they implement the 'quirks' of your device into the framework, so you don't have to deal with it.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#223

Post by torginus »

marmarama wrote: post #220
close04 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of devices are not compliant though That's exactly the problem, there was no standard protocol for communication over Zigbee. Manufacturers could implement whatever they wanted on top of it and put the Zigbee logo, like you can put the WiFi logo on a device that speaks a proprietary protocol over WiFi. You bought into an ecosystem and if you wanted a device from outside of it, you needed another hub. > So you…

Having bought a few Matter devices now, I have discovered that, in practise, Matter is just as full of vendor extensions as ZigBee, and the quirks ecosystem that allows for interoperability despite vendor extensions is far less mature than with ZigBee. Maybe this will get better with time, but we're half a decade into the Matter era and the end-user experience is _worse_ than with ZigBee. In that sense, Matter has fa…

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#224

Post by sisiphos74 »

bluGill wrote: post #45
embedding-shape wrote: post #4

Does this mean they're abandoning Zigbee compatibility? In my experience, Ikea was making the most reliable Zigbee devices considering the price (as someone who just uses Zigbee and no Ikea hubs, just HA+Zigbee), and would be a shame to lose that, but maybe it's a clear sign I should investigate starting to use Matter more instead?

Matter is now a standard not just a common spec. Everyone should demand all new smart home devices support matter. (it is okay if you use Zigbee or some other alternative to control it today but you should still demand matter for the day you switch - that day should come) In particular note the bane of all smart homes: if you have to move the next owner won't have a clue what you did. In the worst case you have to hi…

[dead]

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#225

Post by aljgz »

I bought many ikea products when I moved to a new place, only to be disappointed by all. The light bulbs create a hissing noise, so much to be unusable for bedroom and living room. I put then in the bathroom and storage. The app is much worse than the previous generation. Their sofa bed was so much worse than the much cheaper one I had earlier, I dubned it my worst purchase in the last 5 years, outcompeting the Samsung TV. Lesson learned: just because my favorite brand has good products a couple years back, does not mean I should walk in and buy things from them again.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#226

Post by sisiphos74 »

oritron wrote: post #166

Most of my current-gen IKEA switches will pop out from their steel cradles with normal button presses, because of the curved back of the switch and the curved cradle it connects to magnetically. They've thrown in die-cut double sided adhesive tissue in what I assume was an afterthought, which doesn't peel from one backer sheet in any of the packages I've opened... Maybe it's humidity or temperature sensitive? After a…

[dead]

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#227

Post by protimewaster »

ianburrell wrote: post #187
protimewaster wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I said, my experience has been that the cheaper products run on WiFi. I also don't like that a product advertising "Matter" doesn't answer the question of whether it uses WiFi or not.

I much prefer that a $3 ZigBee temperature and humidity sensor definitely doesn't use WiFi rather than having to dig to see if a cheap a Matter sensor uses WiFi.

I also much prefer the prices of ZigBee.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#228

Post by Mistletoe »

j45 wrote: post #188
Mistletoe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh interesting didn’t know they made security systems too.

My initial thought was if ecobee might integrate with the rest of what you already ave.

I don’t mind switching, the Ecobee security system seems a lot cheaper per month than my Simplisafe.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#229

Post by bobchadwick »

yborg wrote: post #150
moshib wrote: post #3

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.

The FYRTUR blinds were kinda crap, constantly had issues with them losing their minds and having to redo the setup. I also have the later Tredansen cellular shades, and those have been good ... but I just checked and those seem to be discontinued as well. Perils of being early adopter, but kind of soured on the whole smart home concept unless you are wealthy enough to redo all of your home lighting and window treatme…

Huh, I have the entire second story of my house outfitted with FYRTUR shades and the only one that sometimes gives me problems is the one that crashed to the floor when the 3M tape holding it up failed. (Don't get me started on Andersen windows having no way to secure inside-mount shades without voiding your warranty.) That one seems to eat through its battery far more quickly that the others. All the rest of the ten or so shades work flawlessly with ZHA in Home Assistant.

Re: IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

#230

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

notatoad wrote: post #126
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #121

So what's the skinny with Matter devices? I was potentially looking into one so that I could plug my Moccamaster into a smart timer (wonderful coffee maker, but the lack of programmable functionality has my wife constantly wanting to pull out our old Ninja), and I liked what I read about Matter. But it would be my first Matter device and I started to get discouraged when the documentation said I would need to purchas…

the skinny with all smart home tech is that if you try to get by without a hub of some sort, you're signing up for endless frustration. can you use a dumb timer instead of a smart one? if you just want to set a schedule, there's no need for an internet connection there.

I probably could. The challenge came from wanting it to turn on at different times on different days (basically whether my wife is going into the office or working remotely on a given day), so once we started getting into wanting different schedules for M/F, T/W/Th, and S/S, the programmable one just seemed like the way to go, particularly if I wanted to easily turn off a day on-demand.
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