I've been pondering what the changes will be to my setup when Matter support is rolled out on a wider scale, including Hubitat. For instance, when Hubitat and Hue support Matter, do you think some of the best practices about which devices to pair to the Hue hub change? e.g. I have paired my Hue bulbs on the Hue hub but the accessories with Hubitat.
Will the Hue hub still be the best at managing the Zigbee mesh between the different Hue bulbs? Will Matter enable a single Zigbee mesh possible, across differing manufactures? Will all Matter supported devices be able to connect to any Zigbee/matter router? My understanding is that Hue will make the Hub the Matter interface, rather than individual Hue devices.
Or have I got this completely wrong and I should go sit in the corner and remain quiet?
Practices for z-wave and zigbee will not change. z-wave devices cannot be updated to matter and in general neither can current zigbee devices. (there may be some out that can). So the rules will still apply. Now as far as matter goes,. the more thread border routers you have the better for matter over thread devices. Though both matter over thread and matter over wifi devices still use ipv6 for their communications mesh.
Citation? I doubt very much that this will happen... Especially as LR devices have started rolling out. Yeah z-wave and zigbee aren't going anywhere anytime soon.... Especially if the matter spec isn't passing certain attributes for automations.
Impossible to answer at this time. It will be nice if devices joined to the Hue Bridge are available via Matter. The current integration for Hue Bridge, while completely fine for lighting, does in fact fall behind what Hue Bridge integration on HA can do.
On HA, the status of a light joined to the Hue bridge is instantly updated, regardless of whether or not the light is controlled from HA or the Hue app. You can also get the state of all parameters for devices such as the Hue motion sensors in HA when they are joined to the Hue Bridge.
I do hope Matter will change that for HE, but if it can’t then I would hope the Hue Integration could be revised to address these discrepancies. It’s been lagging behind for far too long.
...like the support for Z-Wave dropped when Zigbee came around? No! There is plenty of room (and advantages) for all the chips to fall in one place, like the Hubitat Elevation hub.
Matter just makes possible things that were impossible before, like more Wi-Fi devices to join the ever growing list of smart devices that can actually run local, and not through a proprietary network interface that requires a cloud connection. Together is better than apart and lonely LOL
Of course there is, but it still seems that you both have misinterpreted what @velvetfoot was saying. There's a finite amount of man-power available at Hubitat to address everthing at once. It's about prioritizaition of human resources to make everything better at once (e.g. Impossible), so you pick what gives the most value.
No. Matter does not use Zigbee "natively" like it can with Thread or Wi-Fi. You'd need a Matter Bridge, which can "convert" any protocol to Matter. It's what the Hue Bridge with recent firmware does, and it's theoretically possible to do the same for Z-Wave (though I'm not aware of any now) or any other kind of device.
What may change is that some may prefer to integrate Hue via Matter instead of an integration app, as either should then be possible. (I only know of one Matter integration at the moment, and some features are lacking compared to the API. So maybe not everyone.) But this doesn't have any affect on the underlying Hue devices themselves or their protocol.
Matter will not change this in any way. There is no indication that Hue will move to Thread over Zigbee. As solid as their system is, today, I seriously doubt they'll ever consider switching.
The fact that they decided to go with Matter bridge, making Zigbee devices available to Matter controllers, is pretty convincing statement that Zigbee will remain their preferred protocol.
Yes, that's what Hue and Aqara are doing via their Matter bridges.
All Matter enabled devices can connect (and communicate) to any Matter controller at the same time.
Hue already released Matter for their bridge making (most) of their connected devices available to other Matter controllers that are compatible with Matter bridges.
This is what we know today. Signify chould of course decide at some point to release an end device that supports Thread radios, just like they did with their current bulbs that support both Zigbee and Bluetooth. However, none of us that would be allowed to discuss such things have access to those tea leaves. Their current public stance is that the Hue Bridge is their gateway to matter support for Zigbee based bulbs and devices the Hue Bridge supports. I'm not certain of this (maybe someone else knows), but I would assume this would be for Philips devices only and so for example, joining an IKEA bulb to a Hue bridge probably won't expose it via Matter.
The Hue Bridge is a Matter bridge, not a Matter controller. It will expose Hue devices out from their Bridge as Matter devices so you can add them to Matter controllers. It will not allow adding Matter devcies to your Hue system (and as such does not make sense to speak of it as a commissioner or not).
This is of course true... Otherwise we would have had ZWave LR (edit: or another feature from the 'to do' list) a long time ago instead of it taking a back seat for other development work, for example.
It is just a fact that there are a finite amount of engineer/developer hours. So if you add more things for them to develop, there is less time allocated to the others. No one needs to get defensive about it. it is just math.
I think it will be just fine adding Matter to the mix long term, and that there will still be enough resources to continue to support the Z radios as their feature churn/developer needs are lower at this point.
Sure, I want everything I personally use yesterday, not tomorrow, but I've been very happy and impressed with Hubitat's support and responsiveness and don't expect that to change just from adding Matter support.
Not really. This had not risen to the level of getting attention prior to Matter work being undertaken, for the simple reason that there were, then, no LR devices to support. We wouldn't invest engineering resources then, and it can barely be justified now. That call has nothing to do with Matter or limited resources, unless one thinks we should apply our resources indiscriminately irrespective of real world demand.
Understood. I agree I'm likely in the minority versus normal people. In any case I have another solution that is working (somewhat reliably) for me for Zwave LR support, so I can wait for Hubitat support.
