[oritron]

Most of my current-gen IKEA switches will pop out from their steel cradles with normal button presses, because of the curved back of the switch and the curved cradle it connects to magnetically. They've thrown in die-cut double sided adhesive tissue in what I assume was an afterthought, which doesn't peel from one backer sheet in any of the packages I've opened... Maybe it's humidity or temperature sensitive? After a couple of drops on the ground, some internal plastic cracks and tactile response is lost. I ended up using my own double sided tape but it's not a good user experience. I would bet the new switches don't have a curved back, certainly they've had a number of returns because of this aesthetic choice.

I don't care at all about Thread vs Zigbee (this press release doesn't actually say Thread), beyond the very basics in smart home things you want a computer involved and at that point the way it communicates stops being a big concern. I strongly recommend Home Assistant on a low spec mini pc, beats a Raspberry Pi in ~every metric for this use case.

I've been burned by trusting Matter to mean broad compatability; my Aqara lock doesn't indicate how the door was unlocked over Matter despite showing up in their app, and this is after having to buy their Zigbee bridge because it won't connect to Zigbee devices from other brands. Even with Matter, home automation still needs a geek.

[05]

> I've been burned by trusting Matter to mean broad compatability; my Aqara lock doesn't indicate how the door was unlocked over Matter despite showing up in their app, and this is after having to buy their Zigbee bridge because it won't connect to Zigbee devices from other brands.

Matter was made by the same guys that created Zigbee, proprietary vendor extensions are their bread and butter. Anything trickier than a contact sensor or motion detector, you should definitely research compatibility and definitely not update firmware once it works.

[Fwirt]

I have been spending hours the past couple weeks "ensmartening" my home with IoT switches and power outlets. Home Assistant is gorgeous and is an absolute feat of engineering and a testament to the power of open source, but messing with it you can tell that it's very much "by nerds, for nerds". I don't expect my wife to learn to edit YAML files so she can customize a dashboard. The drag and drop editor mostly works but it's missing a lot of functionality. And if your network topology is anything but flat (i.e. everything connected to one consumer router, which probably does cover 95% of people) then good luck with any of the discovery technology like mDNS or broadcast domains. I have dnsmasq allocate hostnames and static IPs for all my stuff and manually punch in the hostname for 99% of things in HA.

The ecosystem I've had the best luck with is, sadly, Tuya, aka Smart Life, aka giant Chinese conglomerate. Pretty much any small brand (or even some bigger brands) use Tuya to build because they have easy off-the-shelf solutions, and I have some confidence that they're large and entrenched enough that they won't randomly shut off their cloud services. But even if they do, enough reverse-engineering work has been put in that you can run most of your devices locally without a cloud connection. The cloud connection is pretty seamless and is the easiest thing I've had to configure in HA. Once you add a device in the Smart Life app you just reload the HA integration and there it is, ready to go. I actually get less latency toggling lights through HA than through the Smart Life app. I don't really worry about them knowing when my front door is shut or my living room lights are off, and I keep all that stuff on its own VLAN with no outgoing access to the rest of my network.

As I start dabbling with Zigbee and Thread and Matter and stuff, it seems like all of these other "open" "ecosystems" are really complicated and require buying a bunch of hardware I don't want and coordinating another network on another protocol, whereas the Wi-Fi stuff just usually works. It makes (some) sense for extremely low power devices that need to run for years on a battery, but lights and outlets don't really need to be Zigbee devices. BLE devices over an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy work surprisingly well too, and BLE is a less crummy technology than Bluetooth proper and seems to be low power enough for a lot of battery operated devices. I wish everything would just support MQTT because that seems like the most "universal" IoT protocol there is.

[oritron]

There are also Tuya zigbee devices and people have hacked local control of Tuya wifi bulbs to varying degrees. My best stuff is IKEA: their battery powered devices use AAA so I can throw in rechargeable cells and there isn't a ton of waste in CR2032s, and they make the only inexpensive Zigbee buttons I've seen that don't include a double-click (Rodret, not the very similar Somrig). The benefit there is commands are nearly instantaneous, rather than waiting for the maximum double click time before deciding it's a single click. The RGB bulbs don't have a lot of brightness to them in color modes, I wonder if that will change with the new products.

I've got a few locally-controlled wifi bulbs that I bought before seriously getting into home automation. They are Tuya white-label, I'm using the tuya-local integration. Since I can't do something like a zigbee `bind` they are fully network dependent, when they go I'll replace them with IKEA bulbs.

I agree Home Assistant still needs a nerd for setup and tinkering but the default dashboard is impressive and all of the functionality is outstanding.

[kalaksi]

Years ago, I specifically went with zigbee because it's low-power and a simpler protocol stack (and open). No need to even think if the device will run offline or what kind of API it will use. I'm running HA and all the hardware I needed was a USB zigbee dongle and that's it. You pair your sensors, outlets etc. to it using a GUI and by pressing a physical button. No need to coordinate anything yourself, the mesh network can take care of itself.