Matter, set to fix smart home standards in 2023, stumbled in the real market

I don't have an immediate need for one of these, but do you have any plans to expand to Europe or work with a local distributor? Inflated shipping cost & time, VAT & customs duties (+additional processing time) and a cumbersome return process if anything goes wrong, makes for a less than ideal shopping experience.

There isn't an HN promo code is there?

This way you’d get a list of potential customers and we’d get a notification when we’d get an easier option to buy your products.

I don’t drive, as it’s been largely both unnecessary and impractical with where I’ve lived in the past decade, but I know how to check and change the oil in a car, among other basic vehicle maintenance tasks. It’s not hard or time consuming.

IMO the real issue is lack of instilling a sense of agency at a young age.

You were taught how to build cars from a young age. I’m sure you were encouraged to try things yourself along the way. You learned that your actions have a direct impact on the world and that you have the ability to adjust your actions to adjust the impact.

(At least in the US) Education is so retention and information focused that we don’t teach _how_ to apply that information.

Because of this we grow up looking to others for how to do anything, even if we have the know how.

It’s usually not until later in life when people realize their actions can truly have an impact when applied correctly

You could have used a relative educated in economics. Remember that just because you’re an expert in one field doesn’t make you one in another.

The sentence you (partially) quote starts with "if" and ends with "wish". Cough.

Not just with HA, but tech in general really. I love the idea of FOSS, but it's important that stuff just works, every time, without hackery.

But I still wanted to use Home Assistant to control lights. The solution? Smart light _switches_ and wall plugs.

I went with Lutron Caseta wall switches and plug-in dimmers. (Expensive at $60/switch.) Lutron has been doing commercial automation for a very long time and it shows.

1. They work without any automation. Most dimmable LEDs will work.

2. The remotes connect directly to the switches and don’t need a hub.

3. The pro hub model connects to home assistant. You can use unpaired remotes as switches. (Using the correct blueprints.)

I’ve had this set up for over a year and I’ve yet to replace a battery on the many dozens of remotes I have. And I’ve never had a problem with the switch not working.

I get to do all the tinkering I want without breaking my house. :)

Note: I do have some Phillips Hue bulbs for color but those are in lamps separate from overhead lighting.

But after that, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have separate devices anymore, but a single digital identity across all of them, with an interface to control unique capabilities of each of them?

For a banal example - there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to set a timer on our phone, and check it on a computer, or kitchen counter display. On the other hand, I can’t check on the progress of my vacuum robot from my laptop, because the vendor only offers a mobile app. I can’t pull the stats from my car at all, I can’t check a hard drive without plugging it into something compatible, I can’t easily send a big file to someone nearby. Technology should allow us to do all that.

Devices should promote their capabilities and offer a standard interface to control them, and simultaneously be able to display controls for the interface of other devices, depending on available means of input. Done well, this can actually be zero config.

I don’t think the market alone would create a unified rail or telephone network. Yet that has brought immense benefits for society at large, and vendors still manage to capitalise on top of the plumbing.

I wouldn't mind connected services, but when my data is held hostage and the one in control is a faceless company, it does not feel like technology anymore, something that would help you accomplish your task better. Take my smart tv, I would be glad to connect it to my network and not bother with the apple tv when I want to play a movie, but the last time I tried, it tried to forcefully upgrade itself and wouldn't let me skip some onboarding screen that tried to get me to create an account. I had to unplug it. Or when some headphones or mouse manufacturers want me to use bloated proprietary apps just to configure them.

While what you describe is technically feasible, it never feel like this as tech companies always start a conflict with their (paying) users by taking their data hostage, enshitifying their platforms, and destroying any attempt of integration.

As soon as you need to instantiate something with atoms, the cycle-times and overall difficulty increases exponentially. Just when you think you've got something, all these despicable gatekeepers shove their hands in your pockets.

There are lots of reasons we can't have small batch, niche electronic products, and these license fees combined with even worse regulatory costs require enormous sales volumes to amortize.

It's really concerning to see the same rent-seeking values making such strong headway in the software space over the past 5-10 years too.

Take a gue$$

The USB-IF also artificially limits the vendor address space, which gives them the ability to charge exorbitant fees before anyone can deploy a device without conflicts.

I haven't tried to build and deploy a PCI device yet, but given your point, I assume the same game is being played.

At least with these 2 technologies, they can lean on being around for some decades. Bits were quite a lot more expensive 20+ years ago.

Another measly byte (or two) could have made it possible for fees to be reduced down the road, but as-is, there is an artificial barrier to popular access.

I assumed my link in my email was fingerprinted as there are some odd characters encoded into the URL.

As it turns out, it matched the search result link.

That's good to know.

Thanks!

All wired Z-Wave devices also act as repeaters to extend the network, which is handy.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/cpbu9w/ikea_tradfri_bu...

It's possible you've been scammed. I suspect there's a big market in selling knock off Hue bulbs because they can mark up the price so much more.

Big advantage of Matter/Thread is that don't need a hub with its software. It is IP-based protocol. On Wifi or Bluetooth, your phone talks directly to the devices. On Thread, you need a gateway to translate from Wifi to Thread. Your phone only needs to know about Matter.

I don't think Matter devices talk over the Internet, I think they use non-routable IPv6 addresses. You can use HA to control over Internet but that uses the HA app. I don't know what other apps do, probably the same custom thing as with Zigbee.

Matter works similarly to HomeKit, with direct access to devices, but Matter adds the low-power Thread. It is also standardized so that could have generic Matter app instead of every device being its own app. And can add support to HA instead of custom Wifi and Bluetooth devices.