[balloob]

There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized.

If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

(disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)

[hardwaresofton]

> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter.

I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.

Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.

IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other

I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.

Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!

> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.

One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.

[balloob]

Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life.

It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth

[raffraffraff]

Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.

So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)

[cyberax]

ZWave is the most stable radio-based standard right now. It's not great, and it's not very extensible, but it's OK-ish. There's one hackable device: https://z-uno.z-wave.me/technical/ but its SDK is not that great.

Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.

And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.

So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.

[Asmod4n]

thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.

Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.

Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.

Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.

[viraptor]

> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub.

Different expectations. I don't want my things to know that wifi exists. It stops vendor lock-in, it ensures local communication, it means things work even if network goes down. It also makes sure they will never autoupdate or join Mirai botnet.

I've got a mix of zwave (fibaro), ZigBee (Ikea) and ble at home and I'm ok with that.

[Aurornis]

> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi,

Having a lot of career experience in this area, I greatly prefer to keep my IoT devices off of my WiFi.

You don’t need a separate hub device for Zigbee or Z-Wave, just a simple USB adapter that you plug directly into your device controlling everything.

Keeping the low bandwidth IoT devices off of the main WiFi had a lot of advantages. It’s also much easier to rotate your WiFi password when you can do it all without reconnecting every light switch in your house, for example.

[cbull]

The "Hub" device can be as simple as a USB stick that's attached to the machine running Home Assistant. That's what I have been running for years, a Z-Wave USB stick that passes through to a ZwaveJS docker container (which also communicates with HA).

So it's not like you need a big stand alone device that has to have it's own Wifi or ethernet or anything like that, it's just a USB stick.

[baq]

> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.