Agreed. I of course would NOT expect the Hubitat team to hop IMMEDIATELY on what could very well be vapor ware, but āno plansā sounds closer to ānot at allā than āperhaps in the future.ā
In my setup, the ONLY thing that has been rock-solid reliable with absolutely NO issues has been my Lutron system. Hue devices, along with Zigbee and Z-wave have been buggy at times, despite having repeaters and mains-powered devices around the house, and if thereās ever a power outage, I can expect my Hue bulbs and other lights on the Hue bridge to not turn on or off reliably for a few DAYS.
None of this is a knock on Hubitat, but instead on the technology used to communicate with the child devices. A separate IP based mesh network for child devices with multiple nodes that is self-healing sounds like a winning combination to me.
And I never said that I would throw out my Hubitat! I would just add the devices to my HomeKit setup that I use for control anyway. Adding Matter to Hubitat is a convenience to me, not a necessity.
I think that something that would be great for Zigbee to implement would be a change in frequencies so that the Zigbee channels would not be in the same spectrum as WiFi channels. It would make it easier for me to set up WiFi and Zigbee both if I did not have to worry that the Zigbee channel would be stepped on by the WiFi router. As it is, I have chosen channels in both the hubs and the router to try to keep them as far apart as possible. I say this because I have experienced interference when I tried to add a WiFi extender to be able to connect to a Blue Ray player that does not have built-in WiFi. That is one advantage that Z-Wave has over Zigbee. That being said, most of the devices I have are Zigbee. I have very few Z-Wave devices.
You can change the Zigbee channel on the Zigbee Details page. It takes some time for the devices to reestablish the mesh after you do this, so be patient.
I know that. I have done that since I have one hub on channel 25 and the other on channel 20. That is something I did a long time ago. That does not resolve that both Zigbee and WiFi occupy the same 2.4 GHz spectrum and can therefore conflict. Add Bluetooth into the mix and the 2.4 GHz spectrum is quite crowded.
You're missing one point, though. Consumers are getting tired of the whole this only talks to that way of thinking. If the smart home is to truly grow into the next mass consumer technology, where every single home has this stuff built in along the same lines as the smart phone did 15 years ago, then those old ways of thinking absolutely must end.
Honestly they missed the boat by 5 years. The amount of housing starts the past half decade could have gas lit the smart home sector like crazy, but the fragmentation killed it. So did unreliable products, supply issues, and corporations abandoning services. Enthusiasts have gotten us to the point we are at today. And they will just keep making things work the way we want them to work. But to grow further that's not enough. For 95% of the population, who are the next step in growing this industry, that level of tinkering is unacceptable. They need to be able to grab it off the shelf, read a manual, follow some instructions, and then it just works as advertised until they decide to change themselves. And if it breaks there needs to be a replacement available that doesn't require ripping everything out and starting all over.
And it needs to be available. That's the expectation, and in order for that to happen this standard really can't be treated like all the rest.
And so it's crossroads time. They either make this work, or smart homes will go the way of 3D TV's.
To those getting upset about Bruce's comments regarding no plans.... Relax. For any of you who have used this platform your should know that these guys have so far never faltered from providing a community driven product. They are constantly on the boards and actually reply to issues, and correct bugs found by the community at a rate you can only dream of from any other product. Not only fixes, but they are so good with feature requests too. When the community asks, they've proven to listen.
Now I don't speak for the team at all. I'm just a consumer of their products. But I do see it like this. You can't plan for something that doesn't exist yet. And their plates are pretty damn full with what's going on at the moment. Not really seeing how "planning" for a standard that doesn't exist yet is a good idea for a small outlet. It's not like they have a team is 200 programmers in an office in Texas to just whip that together for us. So chill out. I for one am very glad to not be seeing any comments until there's something tangible to act on.
Now when the standard finally gets out there, and there is a basis to write code, and there's an availability of chips to install into new hubs in order to remain relevant in a new Matter world, well I for one am very confident they are going to make that happen folks. Because if it takes off they'll need to. You'd be looking at additional revenue from new hardware, a larger user base... And they've created a name that can hold some weight.
Your setups will continue to work guys. I'm pretty sure they aren't abandon us. Give them some slack.
For me, this is the main question; will my current C7 hub support the proposed standard?
The Aeotec/SmartThings hubs will, my Texas Instruments CC2652P Zigbee 3.0 coordinator that I use with Home Assistant/zigbee2mqtt supports Thread, and will support Matter once the spec is finalized.
I don't know what's inside my C7 chipset-wise; if I did, I'd be able to do research on my own to see if it could support some or all of the proposed standard with a firmware update, or if it's dead in the water.
On the flipside of that, with the exception of my Ikea Tradfri buttons and dimmers that do not work with Hubitat, but work beautifully with my HA/z2m install, every other device I have currently works with Hubitat.
If new devices don't work with Hubitat, they'll go onto my Home Assistant setup.
In my case, I bought my C7 less than a year ago for nearly $200 CDN (everything costs more here), so purchasing a C9 anytime soon just to get Thread/Matter support is a no-go for me.
I think it's probably complicated - if a device is backwards compatible with Zigbee 3.0 which should also be compatible with ZHA 1.2 and ZLL then we could pair devices? If this is true than that should be enough for now.
Also I wonder if the older Zigbee chipset found in the C-7 and C-5 make a difference - meaning direct protocol support is not possible? Of course I am probably misunderstanding how this all works anyway.
Otherwise you could use MQTT in HE to bring in those devices maybe or use something like Node-RED.
