Matter: Is there a HomeSeer technology roadmap or even a plan?

[scbuzz]

Need proof of this in the "real" world. I am still supporting SNA.

Now this made me laugh! We just moved and I found my copy of the SNA Format and Protocols (FAP) reference manual in a long forgotten box!

And speaking of moving, I standardized on Z-wave (about 50 nodes) for lighting, power, etc. in the new house and so far everything is behaving great. The battery powered sensors (including multi-sensors) don't seem to be particularly power hungry. HS4 on a Raspberry Pi handles everything with no problem and no delays.

If Matter gains traction, then eventually those devices may work their way into my setup, likely displacing Z-wave devices in much the same way Z-wave devices replaced my X-10 stuff.

P.S. I should probably change my username from scbuzz to ncbuzz now that the move is complete.

[Mushii]

Wow! I appreciate that many of you have been doing HA much longer than my mere 30 years and too, started with X-10, but I come at this from a very different perspective, as an integrator. Whilst HS4 is great for me, I could not deploy it for 99% of my clients. Instead I spend hours tinkering, finding the best way to make many of those 'commercial' off the shelf / Amazon products to play nice with one another. The client doesnt care about Zwave / Zigbee / BLE / Matter / Thread or anything else - they just want their smart home toys to play nice with on another. Matter and Thread will be that roadmap and as soon as people realise that this maybe much easier than it is today, I can see it rapidly gaining traction. Not having to have a smart home 'hub' but just needing an Open Thread Border Router (which are now being built into devices) that acts as a gateway to allow all of the Thread IoT devices to talk to one another using Matter. All of this will be almost seamless to the end user and for the first time Siri may be able to control Nest products without the need for a 'Middle Man' Home Automation Hub. So what about ZWave ? Although not currently in the Matter alliance they are talking to Matter, so lets see what the future holds for them. HS will always have a niche following / market but as soon as the likes C4 jump in on this and make their products Matter / Thread compliant most of the other HA platforms are going to be in trouble. HST needs to smell the coffee on this one as there are too many big players in these 2 consortiums and too many consumers gagging for this. Think about it this is the first time that Apple and Android (Google) have been in bed together like this - android phones being able to control Apple Home Kit devices natively.......

[upstatemike]

As I have stated elsewhere, I believe Matter is poised to dominate Home Automation in the same way that IPv6 has completely displaced IPv4 in the networking space.

[randy]

As I have stated elsewhere, I believe Matter is poised to dominate Home Automation in the same way that IPv6 has completely displaced IPv4 in the networking space.

Yes, just like that.

[Mushii]

As I have stated elsewhere, I believe Matter is poised to dominate Home Automation in the same way that IPv6 has completely displaced IPv4 in the networking space.

And what about Thread ?

[TC1]

I think some people don't get sarcasm...

[Mushii]

I don’t think some people do it very well….

[upstatemike]

Thread is targeted for use with Matter and since Matter won't be out for some months yet there really isn't much to talk about. Figure 6+ months before Matter is released then another year for manufacturers to license, develop and produce some actual products followed by some time for enough consumers to start using those products and develop significant demand... this is not a "Today" problem for Homeseer to address when there are plenty of more immediate unfulfilled needs to be met around HS4.

[TC1]

..and to add to the reality check, even though Matter is stated as an "open" standard, make no mistake that Silicon Labs has a significant invisible hand guiding its outcome. Outside of open protocols like TCP/IP, SL is the largest manufacturer of integrated circuits of home automation related devices. Even though Z-wave is supposed to be an open standard now, I've never seen anyone else besides SL produce Z-wave chips... hence why the prices have never dropped significantly on Z-wave devices, as opposed to Zigbee which is now IEEE 802.15.4 standard, with several integrated circuits companies supplying for that market and hence cheaper devices.

Despite what I stated above, the one saving grace is that Matter does share a foundation with Zigbee... so there's a good chance SL won't have a stranglehold on the market.

And add the global shortage on integrated circuit manufacturing... we ain't gonna see Matter matter in the near-term time frame.

[ServiceXp]

...we ain't gonna see Matter matter in the near-term time frame.

Nailed it!

[wpiman]

It is interesting that this zwave network has over 300 devices while the protocol only supports 255 nodes. 232 realistically.

Not sure homeseer or zwave are the problem.

[dmiller]

I'm sure I will replace my many WD200 with Matter or something like zwave 900 in five years or do. But from a cost perspective the ZEN77 is a proper trailing edge dimmer for $30. So from my point of view any new mesh network is not going to have much of a cost advantage on mains powered devices.

Z-wave problems are almost always caused by not enough mains powered devices, at least from z-wave plus forward. People with problems either have 1) Old knowledge 2) Not a dense enough repeater backbone (many light switches), or 3) Were very unlucky and got a bad device that jammed the network.

I'm doing an all zwave 700 series system in the next week with 26 mains devices. Using Home Assistant so I can use the zooz 700 series USB stick. I hate HASS zwave, but it will work.

My biggest "z-wave problem" has been GoControl/Nortek Z5 dimmers physically breaking after a couple of years of use. I'm replacing all these devices in a relatives house which allows me to do a "700 series" experiment.

[upstatemike]

I am not against the idea of a better protocol to replace Z-Wave but my question is: Does matter address all (or any) of the things I dislike about Z-Wave for me to consider it a worthwhile improvement? It seems to me any protocol should provide devices that work simply and intuitively like Lego blocks. With Lego you spend all of your energy creating something cool and almost zero time learning how to use the underlying technology of snapping blocks together. That is how home automation should work.

Take for example a simple five button keypad. Basically it consists of 11 devices, a load, 5 buttons, and 5 LEDs. Each of these devices needs a register to track its state so that state can be set, polled, broadcast, etc. Simple. Why would any protocol complicate that model by introducing concepts like root devices and child devices? And why would any protocol fail to report the state of some of the devices and instead force you to use central scene voodoo nonsense to detect and track the state of those devices instead of just having a dedicated register that you can poll for that information?

In our example each of the eleven devices will have some number of parameters that you can set, hopefully from a drop down menu in the UI and not by translating some cryptic list of code numbers and byte lengths. The load needs a register to track which button controls it (with 0 being none... disable of local control solved!) and a few other registers to track other things like power recovery state, ramp rate and other dimming parameters if it is a dimmer, etc. The buttons will have parameters for action (toggle, send on only, send off only, no action) and the LEDs will have parameters for color, on state (on when button on, on when button off, always on. always off), pattern (steady, flash, pulse, strobe, etc.) and brightness. Again simple and intuitive. The user does not need much of a learning curve to select each device and set the parameeters for it and more imprortantly all actions or events using the devices and parameters can be managed in menus without looking up any parameter codes or creating any extra events to detect "central scene changes.

So why does Z-Wave use such a convoluted approach in their protocol and how will Matter, or any other upcoming protocol, resolve this?

And then there is direct device association. This should be a simple communication between two devices that will function using the same communication architecture (routed mesh, broadcast, or whatever) as the core device to controller communications. It just uses a direct path so it can function when the controller is offline for some reason but still updates the controller so it stays in sync when it is online. So why does Z-Wave throw that simple concept out the window and ignore the mesh for direct association and instead demand a super limited direct radio connection between the associated devices? It makes no sense.

I would like to hear how Matter or Z-Wave Long Range, or Thread/Zigbee 3.whatever are going to eliminate these specific horrible, horrible design flaws and justify them being the logical replacement for any existing Home Automation ecosystem. Anything new that does not fix these things is a non-starter that can safely be ignored as far as I'm concerned.

[TC1]

I'm sure I will replace my many WD200 with Matter or something like zwave 900 in five years or do. But from a cost perspective the ZEN77 is a proper trailing edge dimmer for $30. So from my point of view any new mesh network is not going to have much of a cost advantage on mains powered devices.

Z-wave problems are almost always caused by not enough mains powered devices, at least from z-wave plus forward. People with problems either have 1) Old knowledge 2) Not a dense enough repeater backbone (many light switches), or 3) Were very unlucky and got a bad device that jammed the network.

THIS 100%.

Yep, the ZEN77, according to my bench testing (and I've tested WD200, Inovelli Red and the ZEN77), is the gold standard right now in terms of price/performance. The other two dimmers don't even dim linearly or all the way from true 1% to 99%. Plus the ZEN77 does SmartBulb mode and I'm now using it to control Philips Hue bulbs in my house without having to hard-wire the sockets to always on, which means I could always go back to regular bulbs at the drop of a hat.

Agree on your points regarding Z-wave problems... you nailed it. Networking, whether it's Z-wave, Zigbee, WiFi, etc is not black magic or voodoo... it's a science. All problems can be solved if one understands the root cause.

[upstatemike]

Z-wave problems are almost always caused by not enough mains powered devices, at least from z-wave plus forward. People with problems either have 1) Old knowledge 2) Not a dense enough repeater backbone

While this might be true I have to ask is the root of the problem the fact that folks don't buy enough devices they don't need just to bolster the mesh backbone? Or is the problem that a routed mesh is an inappropriate model for a home automation protocol while a broadcast with collision avoidance type sytem would not impose the requirement to buy so many devices just to make it work reliably? I really have concerns about some of the design decisions that went into Z-Wave.