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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I am disappointed that these are not matter out the gate, the door/window sensor and the motion sensor would be instant buys for me (likely several).

IKEA does do a good job with Homekit support (unless the new hub is different) but really wish I did not need that hub anymore.

I am glad that someone is trying to push down the insane home automation tech prices.

Side note: I really hate modern SEO. There is not a single link to the actual Hub mentioned in the article, but there are 2 links to the same article about said hub twice.

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I’ve been wanting to jump into home automation for YEARS but the awful mix of incompatible products and standards coupled with the frequent deprecation of products which often require an online presence, and the outrageous prices being asked for these quite frankly beta products, kept me away. Once matter is standard I expect prices to drop and that’s when I think it’s safe to jump in.

Just use HomeAssistant and find ESPHome compatible hardware. It drastically simplifies everything and there are even vendors like CloudFree [1] that support it out of the box.

I've got several outdoor and indoor hydryponics systems set up that way and it's been a joy (except for the RaspberryPi SD card dying on me, which I've since replaced with a more reliable SSD based SBC)

[1] https://cloudfree.shop/

What kind of hydroponic automation are you doing?

I've got an indoor living wall that I'm thinking of converting to hydro.

Mostly just controlling valves and pumps. I have a dutch bucket system with peristaltic pumps pumping nutrients and pH up/down into a reservoir from which water is pumped to the buckets. An additional nutrient film setup runs on its own with the occasional top up.

Indoors I just have relays controlling lighting and air pumps for a deep water culture system.

Zigbee was the solution that solved these complaints for me. My home automation works 100% offline, thanks to Home Assistant + Zigbee.

Posted it in another comment here already, but this is my go-to resource to figure out compatibility: https://zigbee.blakadder.com/

And pretty much any zigbee device can be compatible with any gateway. In many cases it's just whether someone has taken the time to wire it up in the software or not.

As another sibling suggested you should seriously consider HomeAssistant here. A main selling point is it's ability to seamlessly integrate with an arbitrary mixture of Zigbee/ZWave/Matter/Kasa/<etc> devices under one management interface.

I've been running it for years, keeping up to date with the regular new versions, and haven't had any major complaints for basic use cases like: "I want to turn on <set of lights> when <arbitrary condition occurs> (e.g. sundown, certain sensors detect < X lux of light, wifi device is seen by access point based on its MAC). Super useful. Huge world of possibilities, limited only by your hardware and imagination.

HomeAssistant works, but I'm always surprised when it is praised on Hacker News given the preponderance here for rewriting every program in Rust.

Home Assistant is an unwieldy monolith where spitting out the components would give you so much more control. The side that receives the data works well, however. The quality of the plotting in it is substandard, as is the inbuilt data storage and access. Configuring via YAML is painful, especially when you want derived values (e.g. calculating absolute humidity from RH sensor readings. HomeAssistant comes with no way to clean up dirty data which is something you'll see on their forums that many people request, as cheap sensors are notorious for spurious readings.

It's easy and polished which is why I and I suspect others use it, but I wish there was a modular rewrite.

I agree with the monolith comment, but I am not sure the jab at Rust is warranted.

If we are rewriting HomeAssistant, let's do it in Rust :) Only half joking.

That said, I refuse to write automation in YAML. Logic doesn't really belong in YAML. Declarative stuff would be decent if all you did was to specify a desired end state and let it figure out how to get to that state. But triggers with the equivalent of 'if' conditions that run actions? Let me write the IF. It makes a big difference if you say "Lights should be on between X and Y" versus "condition: after: x before: y: action: turn on". Trivial cases are easy, but when you start combining them it becomes a nightmare.

I have done a lot with NodeRED but it is... strange. It does save me from writing YAML (I do enough of that on my day job), at the expense of being weird and not easy to debug.

As for plotting data, you can send that to Prometheus or InfluxDB and go from there.

I also wish there was an alternative. And more modular "plugins". And a "HA" option. As it is, I have a single raspberry Pi that, while backed up and could be replicated if needed, will go offline for updates and the like, not able to run any automation in the mean time.

It does work though.

> insane home automation tech prices

And yet some comments are complaining that it’s more expensive than a Tuya-based solution or whatever. I think this is at the heart of the problem: people want the longevity and cost of a dumb-home product, but the value of these things is rooted in software. Cognitive dissonance ensues—“you want me to pay a subscription for a door lock?” At least here, IKEA is allowing point-to-point communication that could eliminate moving targets of other companies’ software.

The new hub is different, and does not work with the old Ikea system.

> I really hate modern SEO.

I totally agree, but the real problem is people uncritically sharing and promoting articles from low-quality publications. In other words, your wrath is better directed at the HN users who submit and upvote articles from these low-effort sites. There are plenty of publications, such as LWN, that use links to help the reader, rather than to help themselves through Google’s algorithms.

Same here. I also find myself peeved at the article author, who for some reason decided to spend half a paragraph essentially parroting the company's PR over just how justified this delay is, despite earlier mentioning that they promised Matter support over a year ago.

> Ikea ... has “decided to delay this functionality” and will provide an update “when it’s time.” The ongoing delay is understandable given that Ikea’s products already integrate well with other platforms, and the company is focused on keeping things as simple as possible for anyone who delves into the smart home on a whim while shopping for a new bookcase. And when you consider the hurdles required to get everything running on Matter networks during this period of transition, Ikea’s delay is more than justified.

Would you buy a hub that adds matter to old zigbee devices?

Of course. Rather replace the hub than 23 sensors.

Working on it, expect it after summer. Zigbee+ble+thread+wifi, but currently only sold in EU and for now only supports our own zigbee devices. Search for Ferguson Digital FS2SH. This hub already has ZB, we will add thread via dongle + firmware update. We plan to add matter support to all devices which we can control (slowly adding more, we want them all, but are limited by number of programmers). It's also a little HN worthy, because we plan to use standard nrf dongle and hub will program it on the fly after insertion (for other protocols in future), so you could buy it cheaply yourself. Plus, it has unhindered openwrt root console on easily accessible header inside (will void warrranty though).

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