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Nice headline
Matter sounds neat and all, but it’s still wireless on the 2.4 GHz band, so it will still have the same amount of noise that Zigbee does.
That’s Thread. Matter is an application layer standard, which currently supports running over WiFi, Ethernet or Thread.
Matter could run over new wireless systems in the future.
Besides that, Thread is pretty low-bandwidth and low-noise. It’s designed to sip battery life from devices.
Every Google, Alexa and Apple hub support 2.4Ghz Wifi and likely can be a Matter controllers, however only a subset of them support Thread.
WiFi is already pretty universal in smart automation systems, Matter doesn’t matter much when the underlying protocol is Wifi. And since 99% of Matter devices are WiFi…
That’s why I avoided ZigBee but my Hue bulbs have had WAY fewer problems than my z-wave stuff over the years, so I’m consisting migrating everything.
Fantastic, hoping to see more Matter devices, I wonder what a hub will cost to connect HA to Matter
My Matter (and Zigbee, and Z-Wave) hub is a laptop I paid 300.00 for almost 10 years ago, when I wanted something cheap for the semi truck.
I run Home Assistant on it now. I have both a $40 zwave USB stick, and a similarly priced Zigbee stick.
The software for the hub comes with HA. Just install the matter server
Their zbt-1 dongle can do either zigbee or thread, but matter does not technically need anything else. Thread does, but not Matter. Install Matter Server addon and you can use any matter WiFi device.
I have a Zigbee dongle, so Matter works on WiFi hardware? I don’t need a extra dongle?
Correct. Unlike zigbee and zwave Matter does not define a single communication technique.
It can be used with thread, or over a standard
tcoTCP IP network.Typically, Matter devices will support either thread or WiFi, but there’s no definite distinction to Matter itself.
If you also want to use Matter over Thread devices, you will need a thread dongle. The ZBT-1 can do either thread OR zigbee but not both at once.
In fact, the biggest issue I see with Matter is that there’s no real easy way to tell if the device uses WiFi or thread.
There are a lot of Matter devices out there now, but only a few use the Thread protocol.
If esphome get matter and thread, the DIY smart home device ecosystem will go from great to amazing. Right now esphome just has trouble with truly low power devices due to WiFi, polling, standoff, sleep, etc… Matter instead of the esphome API will probably solve a lot of that.
