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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • I didn’t say pick a brand. I said pick a technology. Some technologies are tied inexplicably to brands but not all. Lightning belongs to Apple. But USB and wifi are multi-vendor technologies. Can you name the brand of USB? no, you buy Logitech and Microsoft and DLink and dozens more brands.

    There are multivendor technologies in home automation. Z-Wave, Zigbee and MQTT/Tasmota are established, to various levels. Matter is a theoretically multivendor tech that is still nascent in the market.


  • go read the wiki ( http://reddit.com/r/HomeAutomation/wiki/index ) to learn about the basic technologies. Do some browsing to see what’s for sale in your market. Pick one tech to be your foundational system (I recommend Z-Wave or Zigbee) that can provide for >80% of your needs. Figure out what your likely runner up is that covers 10-15%, and expect maybe 5% weird gizmos.

    Decide if “suitable for use” is OK or if you need “best in class”. Even in tech, “best in class” winds up with prima donnas that dont play nice. You will find often a company does one thing incredibly well and is a total nightmare to integrate outside their tiny walled garden. Linking multiple walled gardens together becomes a constant pain to keep active. It is often less stressful and more successful to choose “B” products that play nicely over requiring everything be “A+”.

    Now pick a controller than covers your two technologies and top weirdos. You want a primarily local system so look at Homeseer, Hubitat, Homey, Zooz, Fibaro, HomeAssistant, OpenHab and ISY. Decide if you want a pre-built appliance or DIY. Be aware most appliances aren’t great at supporting more than 2 or 3 cameras as video needs a lot of bandwidth and storage. If you plan on multiple cameras you may need something PC based




  • there are hubs/bridges and then there are controllers.

    Every smart device requires a controller because the truth is, none of them are smart. At most you get a timer, which, let’s be honest, was available back in the 60s. It’s the controller that does IF/THEN logic, tying multiple devices together

    Hubs/Bridges let two different technologies talk to each other. Your router is a wifi hub/ethernet bridge you already bought. So you don’t need any bridges to connect Kasa devices. At least as long as your router can handle the number of devices. Many consumer routers are only given enough CPU/RAM to handle maybe two dozen devices.

    So the question you need to ask yourself about Kasa is where is the controller? Who owns that? Who can turn it off? What happens if they do? For most Wifi devices the answer is “in the cloud, owned by the manufacturer, who can turn it off whenever they want and there’s a good chance your switches become dumb switches”.

    Zigbee/ZWave needs a bridge, which is often a USB stick on a PC that acts as a controller or is integrated into a dedicated controller. Every $40 zwave radio is good for 232 devices. Zigbee devices vary but the vast majority are good for 100+ and even the most under-specced Hue hub is good for 50 zigbee bulbs.

    I use HomeSeer running on a mini PC with a zwave usb radio to control my 80+ devices. if Homeseer goes under, I lose remote control until I set up a VPN server. But all my devices will still follow all their programming, I can add new devices, new rules, and let it continue to run for years if I choose.









  • It is highly unlikely you will get such a device in less than 3 years for the simple reason that it has a constant power supply greater than 2 watts. In that scenario, it should either be wifi for the range or act as a wifi/thread bridge (aka border router) to augment the thread mesh without the homeowner needing to worry about their existing mesh*. In either case, control would happen over wifi.

    The CSA (Matter management group) needs to increase the number of wifi/thread bridges on the market to make battery-powered Thread-only devices viable. This is a greater priority than having mains-powered Matter devices that can only act as thread relays.

    *Thread relays have the same issue as zwave/zigbee relays: you have to daisy chain them across your home to extend the mesh contiguously. This means some people need to put relays in places they don’t need any functionality other than to be a range extender. With wifi/thread bridges you can use wifi’s orders of magnitude greater power budget to extend the Thread network in a non-contiguous fashion.


  • This is a Matter device, right? Well, Matter doesn’t support power monitoring. Just like Matter lights don’t support dynamic events.

    One theory is that Google and/or Amazon weren’t prepared to support power monitoring based events or dynamic lighting so they voted it down. Another theory is that endpoint device manufacturers intentionally removed a key feature from the spec to ensure you would still need their app/cloud so they could have vendor lock-in/data harvesting/etc. Third theory is “Why not both?”

    Despite Matter having been hobbled, it is still the best IoT mass-market solution as when Meross inevitably obsoletes these devices, they will still be locally controllable. (Some would argue an MQTT based solution is better but as there’s no 3rd party validation, you can get insecure products like the Nexx garage door opener)

    I , however, detest IoT and stick with zwave devices, which have no innate ability to be on the internet, can’t get firmware “downgrades” or be hobbled by a cloud outage and all get 3rd party validation.