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IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

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Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#41
post #34

What is the equivalent for zigbee2mqtt for Matter/Threads?

I don't know if there's an MQTT bridge yet. Generally, you run some kind of border router and connect through that. While the work doesn't seem complete yet, there's a guide to turn a Home Assistant install into a Thread border router if you have the necessary hardware: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread/#turning-h...

You can probably plumb Home Assistant into your MQTT server from there.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And manufacturers tend to lock down their Matter devices, too, so you can't flash Tasmota or ESPHome on them. See: Shelly, Sonoff.

Not just tend to, have to. Matter certification requires flash encryption and FW signing.

Are these requirements public?

I was working on a Matter device but it never got certified due to high cost/lack of customer demand.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#44

My first reaction here was horror: Home Assistant and Zigbee integrate perfectly with IKEA’s devices, and the devices are beautifully designed! Please don’t take these away! Only the other day did I marvel at how a low battery indicator flashes on one of my remotes when I use it. A design flourish that I really appreciated. But I read that Thread supports IPv6 via mesh networking. It did always feel a bit awkward hav…

The thread border gateway (Apple TV, HomePod, Google Nest Speaker, etc) sends an IPv6 router advertisement to the network for the Thread IP space. Multiple border gateways can advertise the same IP space for redundancy.

I have/had a segmented network, so I made sure my router accepted this route so that devices on different networks could communicate with the Thread devices. It worked, usually. However, I ran into some challenges with the reliability of communicating from my phone to various devices. I never quite got mDNS reflection 100% correct, and I strongly suspect that's my problem. If you look at an mDNS entry for a device, you'll see some advertise all their IPv6 addresses including link local (fe80::). I suspected some clients were dumb, trying the first IP they found, and giving up when it didn't work. I was working on modifying the golang mdns-reflector project to filter these entries. I had some success, but I haven't finished.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#45

My first reaction here was horror: Home Assistant and Zigbee integrate perfectly with IKEA’s devices, and the devices are beautifully designed! Please don’t take these away! Only the other day did I marvel at how a low battery indicator flashes on one of my remotes when I use it. A design flourish that I really appreciated. But I read that Thread supports IPv6 via mesh networking. It did always feel a bit awkward hav…

> Can anyone here confirm that Matter/Thread will be a bright, open, and happy new future? Sorry, it’s a closed ecosystem. It relies on PKI and device attestation to ensure that only devices from approved partners are usable. It’s unlikely that small players can participate, and zero chance of any homebrew scene.

I disagree that there’s zero chance for a homebrew scheme; it’s pretty easy to enable development mode and commission self-made devices using Google Home or Apple Home on both iOS and Android.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#46

My first reaction here was horror: Home Assistant and Zigbee integrate perfectly with IKEA’s devices, and the devices are beautifully designed! Please don’t take these away! Only the other day did I marvel at how a low battery indicator flashes on one of my remotes when I use it. A design flourish that I really appreciated. But I read that Thread supports IPv6 via mesh networking. It did always feel a bit awkward hav…

> It did always feel a bit awkward having Zigbee networking and IP networking competing over the same site Funny, to me that's a feature. It makes the threat of a hacked device that exfiltrate data from within your network much less likely. I avoid any wifi device because of that.

This. The network fragmentation is the point, just like how some businesses would run IPX internally and use a proxy for web/IP traffic to protect corporate infrastructure from malicious devices or software.

Not everything has to be on TCP/IP. For smart home connectivity, I’d say that’s a feature, provided said networking standard is just as open as TCP/IP.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#48
post #28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You can buy a very cheap ESP32 with Thread and easily build your own device with Matter/Thread and it will work. Doesn't seem that closed. There is OpenThread that is an open source implementation of Thread. Home Assistant is compatible with Matter over Thread devices... What's closed about this?

You can’t talk to other devices unless you got the private key of them.

I know almost nothing about Matter but is this true? I though that if you control your own fabric, you can talk to any device on it because they trust your controller.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#49

This sucks. Matter is a closed ecosystem, enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and device attestation certificates. Thread seems to require paying royalties if you want to ship devices. It’s disappointing that IKEA claims that this move is towards a more open ecosystem. On top of that, the switch breaks compatibility with existing hardware (except for the Touchlink functionality). If you have a bunch of Z…

> If you have a bunch of Zigbee devices, but at some point want to add some of the new ones, you need to start thinking about replacing all the perfectly working Zigbee devices or have a fragmented network. Yes, if you're using the manufacturer's half-assed smartphone app, but if you're on Home Assistant, like basically anyone who's serious about their smart home, having multiple kinds of smart devices isn't really a…

Yes, but then you have a hard-dependency on HA for inter-network communication, which I try to avoid as much as possible (but I fail to, for a couple of subsystems). My failure model is:

1) no electricity, everything down but fiber, wifi, HA and the doorbell (they run off an UPS)

2) internet down: no problem, you just cannot reach the home automation from outside

3) Home assistant down: zigbee devices are paired together (like buttons + bulbs) or I have physical zigbee relays controlling dumb bulbs.

But, as said, I have some subsystem not fully working when (3) happens, like a zigbee button controlling a tasmota-based fan control.

Re: IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

#50
post #33

My IKEA was missing a lot of Trådfri assortment when I visited this week. I started to have doubts if they had abandoned the home automation niche. Now when I am searching their site, much is gone. But I guess they are clearing the inventory for a Threads relaunch

That's such a shame. I bought quite a few IKEA devices as they were the cheapest in the market and were Zigbee-driven, which meant I could use it with my custom-made SmartHome software (which does what Home Assistant does but without a heavy runtime) and they connected with other manufacturer's devices (they form a mesh, so as long as you have a Zigbee device every few 10s of meters, the devices can communicate with the central hub even from very far away). I wonder if I will be able to connect to Thread devices at all now.
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