Having switched to zigbee devices recently I regret trying to start with WiFi. While I'm not sure how it looks under the hood, adding devices with home assistant was miles easier.
I've helped lots of people with home automation Network build outs l; the biggest factor is the RF environment.
If you're fortunate enough to not be battery constrained at most endpoints and can put a high quality Wi-Fi access point in an optimal location than Wi-Fi is incredibly reliable.
The tooling for inspecting all layers of a Wi-Fi network is infinitely more accessible and mature and that certainly helps; I can't go to My local big box store and get a USB thread dongle for 20 bucks that will just work on a Lennox computer and integrate nicely with Wireshark out of the box...
I have a Unifi home network with two Wifi 7 access points and gigabit ethernet. For home automation, I went with ZWave and do not regret it at all. It's been rock solid and I've never felt the need to get a dongle to debug the traffic. I don't want to be working through all of the WiFi baggage with my home automation devices. I recently introduced some Zigbee bulbs (hue and cheapos from Amazon) and they've been mostly "fine", albeit with lower range.
Thread is fairly similar to Zigbee, just standardized and doesn't require brand specific hubs. You can actually control thread devices direct from an iphone with no hub at all.
Wifi for anything but cameras is a mistake, it only exists for maximum compatibility since everyone has wifi already.
Cameras that require internet to connect to are a mistake, but cameras that use Wifi for local link are fine (wifi is perfect for this). And, having some way to connect remotely is a requirement, for most everyone.
A bit of clarification: Thread is a layer 2 protocol, for the user, it looks like standard IPv6. Matter is application level, and just expect standard TCP/IP underneath. There's nothing binding Matter to Thread, and in fact a lot of Matter devices use Wifi
We don't want incredibly flexible devices. I think we learned that lesson many times, including with ZigBee. If there's one standard, there's only one standard.
A lot of graphs where OpenThread & zigbee dance around each other, are within 2x of each other.
Two huge notables to me: message throughput for openthreads scales up, zigbee seems to hit a wall early. Not sure when that matters but very clear. The last table was a fright through: it takes half a minute for OpenThreads to recover after a node drops where-as Zigbee a quarter second! Wow.
Is there a situation in which your smarthome taking 30s to recover from a node failure is impacting your life? Seems like a distinction without a difference
Standing outside with an armfull of groceries, and a door is now our of range of your hub temporarily due to the failed node. 30s can seem like quite a while standing in the rain.
Not exactly a strong argument if you need like 5 qualifications to demonstrate the issue. If the right node fails, if it happens right as you walk up, if it's raining, if your porch is uncovered, if your door doesn't have an immediate fallback... I'm sure someone will be affected because of the law of large numbers, but it seems like an unlikely scenario to base a purchasing decision on.
A light switch not working for 30 seconds, or a door not opening for 30 seconds, even if only sporadically, is a significant loss of life quality, no qualifiers needed.
> A light switch not working for 30 seconds, or a door not opening for 30 seconds
I dunno if its just me, but having a manual override for such important/basic stuff is kind of a must for me. As much as I enjoy smart home stuff, having anything critical only available via that is just stupid.
Do you have any smarthome stuff? Standing around waiting 30 seconds for your light to come on would be moronic. A complete regression over the electric switch invented in 1884. I'd rip everything out right then and there. Your home should be reliable, smart or no.
Whilst I agree a smart home offers some benefits that your 1884 switch simply cannot match. And the cruicial point is that the 30 seconds are the worst case situation where something went wrong on the network. Its not the usual operational experience you'll get.
For me, having to wait 30 seconds once every blue moon is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
Yes, zwave is in the much less congested 900mhz range. It is a fair bit more reliable as it doesn’t compete with:
- WiFi
- Bluetooth
- microwave ovens
Additionally, it’s a bit more strict with certification so you can easily use multiple vendors for zwave whereas with zigbee it’s often a terrible experience since vendors implement things differently in ways that are not as interoperable. In fact, for a device to be certified by the zwave alliance, it must pass strict conformance testing to ensure backwards compatibility and interoperability.
All it costs is significantly more money and less options.
If you limit your pool of zigbee devices to just more reputable companies, you'll end up with around the same amount of options as zwave and they'll be reliable but significantly cheaper.
You also have the option to find some super cheap stuff that works just fine. That usually requires some research but not much. You can also build ESPHome devices for zigbee but that's pretty niche, to say the least.
Having previously been all zwave then moved and tried to go matter but ended up with zigbee, I wish I never listened to people saying what you are. As far as I'm concerned, zwave doesn't know it's dead yet and Matter isn't going to fulfill it's promises because the corporate interests that wouldn't give you local control with zigbee aren't suddenly going to change their minds because it says matter now.
But Matter _is_ locally-controlled. Matter-over-Thread is better as there's no side channels to abuse; Matter-over-Wifi also guarantees local control though the presence of Wifi means a high probability of some additional onboard software bloat the manufacturer can use to enshittify the product if you're not careful.
My entire “smart” home setup is built with Matter over Thread. It’s fully local. No internet access required. With Home Assistant onboarding can be done without a smartphone now. Devices without official certification work but probably only in Home Assistant.
My Matter over Thread stuff keeps occasionally falling over in Home Assistant and becoming unavailable, probably a router issue as I’m using a homepod mini but still endlessly frustrating.
I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.
My whole setup is, suboptimal, to put it delicately. It’s just running on a NUC that’s crammed inside my AV cabinet, antennas would be crammed in there as well. I mostly buy zigbee stuff but it’s hard to ignore how cheap the Ikea Matter over Thread kit is.
Dunno, personally I have found HA + MoT to be strictly worse than Z2M. It's the classic case of the Douglas Adams quote:
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices.
I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.
I never had any problems with Thread that couldn’t be fixed by pulling batteries from a crashed Ikea device and I have very little interest in how the protocol works.
Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children.
Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor?
I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.
This is both good and bad, and no surprise its an American standard. Lower frequencies have higher range, which is good if you live in a house (because range), and bad if you live in an apartment (because interference and crowded channels). So it will compete with itself, and everything on the ISM band (which you have no control over).
Zwave frequencies, as well as regulations, vary between countries/regions. This means that equipment isn't interchangeable, something I'm currently running into - I can't get a zwave electronic door lock for Japan while I could easily have bought one in my home country. But I wouldn't be able to bring it if I wanted to.
Zigbee is basically the same everywhere, however the 2.4GHz band is of course somewhat congested.
Because zwave is proprietary. There's money to be made here! Can you imagine the lost profit potential if people standardize on an open protocol like ZigBee?
Most likely it's not a super robust transmission mode like LoRa (that works down to -145dBm). Having a well designed antenna with a good pattern help a lot then.
They're probably only comparing open protocols. If one doesn't care if their protocol is proprietary then sure one might consider zwave. But it's hardly "surprising" that it's left out.
What? The entire specification is in this git repo maintained by the home assistant team. Also, they’re on the zwave board now. It’s wholly open, but wasn’t maybe 4-5 years ago.
I'd like to use z-wave but as an Australian we have different allowed frequency bands (specifically the USA-market gear uses frequencies that are reserved for telecom use over here, and anything that can interfere with the ability to call emergency services is Very Illegal), and thus the few devices that get built supporting the AU rf bands are overly expensive due to the (lack of) economy of scale.
As a result my home automation stack is a mix of zigbee, Matter (over both Wifi and Thread), and just plain WiFi. All of which uses the 2.4Ghz (and 5Ghz but mostly 2.4 for the IoT stuff) ISM band(s) and is thus cheap and plentiful.
Not sure how many other regions suffer the same issues, but I suspect that z-wave will be outcompeted by the more modern alternatives in the coming years.
I’m in the process of migrating from Zigbee (Z2M) to Matter over Thread (Apple HomePods + Matter Server).
My Zigbee network was a mishmash of different vendors all of which had their own failure rates and quirks, Aqara having by far the highest failure rate and complexity.
My new Ikea (Thread) based setup has had absolutely zero issues so far and fingers crossed it doesn’t start suffering as I scale it out. That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
You don't need to update your devices, and they don't need to be connected to any cloud. That's the whole point of these local communication protocols, after all.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but the moment you add any IP connectivity it will be eventually used to mandate internet access. The devices you have now might not yet demand it, but you will have to replace them at some point or extend your setup in the future. We've seen this play out so many times now, it's baffling people still think this time will be different.
There's a saying: If you set up a trough, the pigs will come.
For IPv6 networks you're in luck. The hubs are not proxies so the IPv6 enabled IoT device in an IPv6 network can still be blocked at firewall level from accessing the internet. Less that the separation Zigbee provides but better than nothing.
For IPv4 networks you're out of luck. The internal mesh traffic is still IPv6 to the hub and anything crossing into the IPv4 network is done through the hub's IP. No more blocking available unless it's a feature of the hub. I'm not aware of any hub having this kind of FW capability.
Firewall blocking is not the point. The point is, that over time through enshitiffication the new device will require call home to unlock. Even when it does not need internet to work at all. But through this the vendor will get a foothold.
Sure you can block it, but then you have a pricey paperweight.
This is not unique to Thread/Matter, they can pull the rug on ZigBee as well, ofc.
The assumption of enshitification it that is receives updates. What you and a few others aren't understanding is that these don't need updates. These aren't Alexa or Google devices. They just get setup and passively work
Now, will they eventually build devices that don't work like that? Maybe.
A lot of companies have invested a lot into matter and thread. I’d be surprised if companies started requiring a call home to work. It doesn’t make sense to need that, since a thread network is, in a sense, offline by nature. Only the hub has access to the internet and it doesn’t require access to work, so having a device require a call home wouldn’t really make sense.
I get that enshittification is a real thing but I’d be surprised if it affected smart home devices in the way you are describing.
Zigbee: You can buy vendor independant bridge / antenna and vendor independant automation server (Home Assistant being the most popular).
I guess a bridge vendor could pull the rug on the antenna ("your Sonoff zigbee antenna is now only compatible with Sonoff zigbee product")(to be clear: they've never done that), but the format is open enough that there's ton of alternative suppliers and open source bridge (the aforementioned zigbee2mqtt).
In any case, I've got a good amount of both Ikea tradfri and Philips Hur bulb and they have never contacted an Ikea or Philips hardware or software of their life.
That they would never see me buying again from them.
That I can stop OTA.
That matter is interoperable and I can run multiple gateways before cutting them out.
Most IoT stuff I own had a good track record. The only stuff that screwed me over was the logitech harmony smart remote.
But I usually pick the more open ecosystems and vendors. E.g.heating is on shelly.
If we start from GP premises where they were multi-vendor on ZigBee and now (allegedly) are living a much better mono-vendor life with Matter, you cannot play the multi-vendors card.
I'm on ZigBee multi-vendor orchestrated by Zigbee2MQTT and while some devices are quirky sometimes (worse offender... IKEA) I'm not planning to move over to Matter any time soon at all.
> That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
I’m taking your “but” to mean “it is acceptable.
I would at least deem it noticeable to wait a quarter second for my light to turn on. May just be my own impatience, but I get an insta-headache whenever I have to wait to find out whether something worked or I have to try again. Every bit of jank is a downgrade in quality of life to me.
Now: May this be due to that specific setup or is the delay somehow inherent to the technology?
In many situations you're already "latent" due to interacting via voice: "Hey Siri, turn on the lights" is ~3-4 seconds to say casually, allow another 0.5-1.0 seconds due to voice processing, network, etc, and the missing 200ms is basically par for the course.
Where it starts to get annoying is "door open" and "motion detected" triggers. Motion detected can be played off as a sloppiness in the sensor cone, but going from "instant" to "laggy video game" when you have a physical trigger can be relatively annoying.
`establishing it as
a more robust foundation for larger and more heterogeneous
deployments.`
Based on.... 6 devices?
Quite honestly I would have been interested in measurements with more than only 6 devices. Maybe upto 50 or so,even better if they'd mixed different hardware nodes for a more realistic scenario
Absolutely. My setup which is about 1 month old already has 14 devices and I'm just getting started.
Only having 6 devices really feels comically small for a study investigating the performance of communication protocols where device count can really make a differnce, as observed by even then changes from 1 to 6 devices.
I have 47 thread/matter devices, alongside some 10-15 matter over wifi devices, so not quite 50, but "close enough".
It's not as fast as Zigbee, not in day to day usage, and not in terms of reconnecting, which often takes 30 seconds (ie. after a power outage) where my Zigbee devices just seem to reconnect instantly. On day to day usage there's a slight delay when turning something on, but it's maybe 100ms or less.
I initially had quite a few problems, but after "standardizing" on a single thread network (I had 3 before for some reason), as well as adding some wired thread border routers, things have become much more stable.
My zigbee to thread is still a "work in progress", replacing devices as they fail (ie. lightbulbs), and I'm also still adding new Zigbee devices like the Aqara T1 Valve controller, but I prefer thread over zigbee today.
One thing I will note, people tend to underestimate the range of thread (and zigbee for that matter). Each mains powered device will function as a repeater just like zigbee, and I initially thought I might need a couple of smart plugs as repeaters, but despite having a somewhat large house (by european standards) as well as double brick walls dividing it, my thread devices have no problems "seeing" a thread border router in the opposite end of the house.
I have tons of devices and I wish everything was Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi has its problems but at least it is easily measurable, debugable, ... Zigbee is a voodoo protocol: you initiate the pairing and hope for the best. And then you hope for the best to have it stay on.
I'm running both now, and while my Matter network seems to be solid, I can't get over the fact that it's so much harder to set up devices than on Zigbee. Why does Google need to get involved for me to set up a local IKEA device with my local border router?
As someone with hundreds of Zigbee devices w/ zigbee2mqtt in a network (actually 2; one in my standalone garage, and one in the house), I'm hoping Thread/Matter will not take over because _for me_ it does not have a single improvement over Zigbee 3.0 and I have had 0 inclination to adopt any Matter devices so far. Probably why Zigbee 4.0 is a thing.
vdfs | 20 hours ago
They fix some problems but add more, you endup just like that xckd about protocols
Forge36 | 19 hours ago
baby_souffle | 19 hours ago
If you're fortunate enough to not be battery constrained at most endpoints and can put a high quality Wi-Fi access point in an optimal location than Wi-Fi is incredibly reliable.
The tooling for inspecting all layers of a Wi-Fi network is infinitely more accessible and mature and that certainly helps; I can't go to My local big box store and get a USB thread dongle for 20 bucks that will just work on a Lennox computer and integrate nicely with Wireshark out of the box...
Dan_- | 19 hours ago
Fixed link: https://www.mouser.com/en/ProductDetail/Nordic-Semiconductor...
And there’s a little configuration: https://wiki.makerdiary.com/nrf52840-mdk-usb-dongle/guides/n...
hiitsmyaccount | 18 hours ago
Dan_- | 17 hours ago
hiitsmyaccount | 18 hours ago
Gigachad | 19 hours ago
Wifi for anything but cameras is a mistake, it only exists for maximum compatibility since everyone has wifi already.
esseph | 19 hours ago
nomel | 18 hours ago
rob-olmos | 18 hours ago
fragmede | 18 hours ago
kps | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 12 hours ago
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
If you are halfway serious about your home security, you should use ethernet. It's trivial for thieves to jam wifi now.
wao0uuno | 15 hours ago
zer00eyz | 18 hours ago
Buttons (key presses, remotes - think rapid input), Knobs, sliders, Pixel LED' strips, some MM wave sensors, ir/radio transmitters, really need wifi.
There is products where you will want a bluetooth proxy, plenty of kitchen/grill thermometers and scales for kitchen and bathroom are great examples.
Where range is an issue LoRa is a thing that has plenty of devices and is easy to DIY.
unsnap_biceps | 18 hours ago
deadmutex | 19 hours ago
amarcheschi | 15 hours ago
torginus | 14 hours ago
archagon | an hour ago
inigyou | an hour ago
preisschild | 12 hours ago
WiFi is not designed for lots of low energy devices that can be repeaters.
jauntywundrkind | 20 hours ago
Two huge notables to me: message throughput for openthreads scales up, zigbee seems to hit a wall early. Not sure when that matters but very clear. The last table was a fright through: it takes half a minute for OpenThreads to recover after a node drops where-as Zigbee a quarter second! Wow.
richwater | 19 hours ago
4chandaily | 18 hours ago
AlotOfReading | 17 hours ago
codeflo | 14 hours ago
NekkoDroid | 13 hours ago
I dunno if its just me, but having a manual override for such important/basic stuff is kind of a must for me. As much as I enjoy smart home stuff, having anything critical only available via that is just stupid.
alexjurkiewicz | 17 hours ago
denkmoon | 14 hours ago
8-prime | 13 hours ago
For me, having to wait 30 seconds once every blue moon is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
diffeomorphism | 12 hours ago
The automated stuff like "starting at sunrise gradually adjust the lights" might be delayed by 30 seconds. Annoying but hardly rage inducing.
solarkraft | 10 hours ago
SEJeff | 19 hours ago
asveikau | 19 hours ago
unsnap_biceps | 18 hours ago
tehlike | 14 hours ago
mukundzzha | 14 hours ago
SEJeff | 18 hours ago
- WiFi
- Bluetooth
- microwave ovens
Additionally, it’s a bit more strict with certification so you can easily use multiple vendors for zwave whereas with zigbee it’s often a terrible experience since vendors implement things differently in ways that are not as interoperable. In fact, for a device to be certified by the zwave alliance, it must pass strict conformance testing to ensure backwards compatibility and interoperability.
petre | 16 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-range_device#SRD860
In the US you also have the FCC reshaping the 900 MHz for industrial broadband and NextNav. So there will be more competition.
https://www.nemko.com/blog/fcc-reshapes-the-900-mhz-band-for...
https://www.landisgyr.com/br/pt/home/knowledge/blog/Navigati...
parineum | 16 hours ago
If you limit your pool of zigbee devices to just more reputable companies, you'll end up with around the same amount of options as zwave and they'll be reliable but significantly cheaper.
You also have the option to find some super cheap stuff that works just fine. That usually requires some research but not much. You can also build ESPHome devices for zigbee but that's pretty niche, to say the least.
Having previously been all zwave then moved and tried to go matter but ended up with zigbee, I wish I never listened to people saying what you are. As far as I'm concerned, zwave doesn't know it's dead yet and Matter isn't going to fulfill it's promises because the corporate interests that wouldn't give you local control with zigbee aren't suddenly going to change their minds because it says matter now.
BHSPitMonkey | 15 hours ago
wao0uuno | 15 hours ago
iamacyborg | 14 hours ago
wao0uuno | 14 hours ago
iamacyborg | 13 hours ago
torginus | 14 hours ago
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices.
I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.
wao0uuno | 14 hours ago
Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children.
Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.
torginus | 14 hours ago
Tor3 | 14 hours ago
Zigbee is basically the same everywhere, however the 2.4GHz band is of course somewhat congested.
walrus01 | 17 hours ago
https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/
https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zst39-z-wave-long-range-usb-sti...
the zooz is this internally: https://www.silabs.com/wireless/z-wave/800-series-modem-soc/...
mrheosuper | 16 hours ago
margalabargala | 15 hours ago
SEJeff | 15 hours ago
https://github.com/zwave-js/specs
schubidubiduba | 14 hours ago
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
You can see it in products like inovelli where zwave is always more than zigbee.
https://inovelli.com/collections/z-wave-light-switches-red-s...
cryptoegorophy | 16 hours ago
SuperMouse | 15 hours ago
margalabargala | 15 hours ago
SEJeff | 15 hours ago
https://github.com/zwave-js/specs
brianaker | 14 hours ago
All three of them have their shortcomings. Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate; I have my doubts about it having any longterm future.
preisschild | 12 hours ago
How is Matter (APL2) over OpenThread (BSD-3-Clause) not "open"?
> Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate
How is this network "unsecured" exactly? Thread IS encrypted and authenticated.
waste_monk | 14 hours ago
As a result my home automation stack is a mix of zigbee, Matter (over both Wifi and Thread), and just plain WiFi. All of which uses the 2.4Ghz (and 5Ghz but mostly 2.4 for the IoT stuff) ISM band(s) and is thus cheap and plentiful.
Not sure how many other regions suffer the same issues, but I suspect that z-wave will be outcompeted by the more modern alternatives in the coming years.
/rant
cpressland | 13 hours ago
My Zigbee network was a mishmash of different vendors all of which had their own failure rates and quirks, Aqara having by far the highest failure rate and complexity.
My new Ikea (Thread) based setup has had absolutely zero issues so far and fingers crossed it doesn’t start suffering as I scale it out. That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
tetris11 | 13 hours ago
HerAnt | 13 hours ago
AnonymousPlanet | 13 hours ago
There's a saying: If you set up a trough, the pigs will come.
close04 | 12 hours ago
For IPv4 networks you're out of luck. The internal mesh traffic is still IPv6 to the hub and anything crossing into the IPv4 network is done through the hub's IP. No more blocking available unless it's a feature of the hub. I'm not aware of any hub having this kind of FW capability.
jnovacho | 10 hours ago
Sure you can block it, but then you have a pricey paperweight.
This is not unique to Thread/Matter, they can pull the rug on ZigBee as well, ofc.
homeonthemtn | 10 hours ago
Now, will they eventually build devices that don't work like that? Maybe.
jnovacho | 9 hours ago
And in the future, the offline devices might be no longer available, because they stopped being produced. And only new shittier ones are for sale.
Xerox9213 | 7 hours ago
I get that enshittification is a real thing but I’d be surprised if it affected smart home devices in the way you are describing.
afzalive | 7 hours ago
So what's your solution to this problem?
zeratax | 7 hours ago
pshirshov | 10 hours ago
Zigbee devices are slow and low power, they cannot access internet directly.
misnome | 9 hours ago
PetitPrince | 9 hours ago
I guess a bridge vendor could pull the rug on the antenna ("your Sonoff zigbee antenna is now only compatible with Sonoff zigbee product")(to be clear: they've never done that), but the format is open enough that there's ton of alternative suppliers and open source bridge (the aforementioned zigbee2mqtt).
In any case, I've got a good amount of both Ikea tradfri and Philips Hur bulb and they have never contacted an Ikea or Philips hardware or software of their life.
treffer | 12 hours ago
Most IoT stuff I own had a good track record. The only stuff that screwed me over was the logitech harmony smart remote.
But I usually pick the more open ecosystems and vendors. E.g.heating is on shelly.
darkwater | 10 hours ago
solarkraft | 10 hours ago
I’m taking your “but” to mean “it is acceptable.
I would at least deem it noticeable to wait a quarter second for my light to turn on. May just be my own impatience, but I get an insta-headache whenever I have to wait to find out whether something worked or I have to try again. Every bit of jank is a downgrade in quality of life to me.
Now: May this be due to that specific setup or is the delay somehow inherent to the technology?
ramses0 | 7 hours ago
Where it starts to get annoying is "door open" and "motion detected" triggers. Motion detected can be played off as a sloppiness in the sensor cone, but going from "instant" to "laggy video game" when you have a physical trigger can be relatively annoying.
XiS | 13 hours ago
Based on.... 6 devices?
Quite honestly I would have been interested in measurements with more than only 6 devices. Maybe upto 50 or so,even better if they'd mixed different hardware nodes for a more realistic scenario
8-prime | 13 hours ago
8fingerlouie | 10 hours ago
It's not as fast as Zigbee, not in day to day usage, and not in terms of reconnecting, which often takes 30 seconds (ie. after a power outage) where my Zigbee devices just seem to reconnect instantly. On day to day usage there's a slight delay when turning something on, but it's maybe 100ms or less.
I initially had quite a few problems, but after "standardizing" on a single thread network (I had 3 before for some reason), as well as adding some wired thread border routers, things have become much more stable.
My zigbee to thread is still a "work in progress", replacing devices as they fail (ie. lightbulbs), and I'm also still adding new Zigbee devices like the Aqara T1 Valve controller, but I prefer thread over zigbee today.
One thing I will note, people tend to underestimate the range of thread (and zigbee for that matter). Each mains powered device will function as a repeater just like zigbee, and I initially thought I might need a couple of smart plugs as repeaters, but despite having a somewhat large house (by european standards) as well as double brick walls dividing it, my thread devices have no problems "seeing" a thread border router in the opposite end of the house.
BrandoElFollito | 13 hours ago
Wi-Fi has its problems but at least it is easily measurable, debugable, ... Zigbee is a voodoo protocol: you initiate the pairing and hope for the best. And then you hope for the best to have it stay on.
timvdalen | 11 hours ago
moogly | 7 hours ago