Matter – Protocol to connect compatible devices and systems with one another (opens in new tab)

So you went hence thither and then thence hither again whence you came.

Yeah. I was very excited about this until i got to "Bluetooth Low Energy for provisioning" and I was like "oh.." and then "Wi-Fi for high-data rate connectivity" was a "oh. no thanks." That's a clear path to the internet and also using multiple radios so that if I lock down one thing I have to constantly worry about others.

As it stands I dont see this being a thing that benefits me. It is more likely that this pushes smart home manufacturers away from Zwave, and makes my life worse because now I can't buy IoT devices without granting them internet access. Then I have to go through and start setting up IoT VLANs to quarantine devices, and in some really shitty cases, Ive seen WiFi devices where the app sends a message to a server, and the server sends a message to the device... so I can't quarantine the device without modifying it or losing functionality (see MyQ garage door openers). The industry looks bleak.

Agree on all points of preferring Z-wave though and it's also what I use. However, Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) recently redid all the switches in his home with Zwave switches... and they had a firmware issue... And the company refused to publish firmware updates in any way except through "official" Zwave hubs, and not Home Assistant. It eventually got sorted out, but Zwave isn't necessarily intrinsically failproof either.

    As it stands now I don't care at all who made my Z-wave switches/bulbs/plugs

This is maybe an optimistic view of Z-wave in my mind... early on quality and reliability problems were nearly universal with Z-wave devices, and today I have a fairly short list of brands I trust (e.g. Zooz) after having been burned by a series of devices with various firmware bugs or just very poor lifespans. The best story I have is the lightbulb that would turn on every time it received an explorer packet, and thus every time my hub at the time ran a heal, which was of course scheduled at 2AM every day and not easy to disable due to the hub's poor firmware. This was years ago, but then there's still a surprising number of Z-wave devices on the market that are just Z-wave, not the poorly named Z-Wave Plus or Z-Wave Plus V2, and thus have significantly inferior network reliability if there are any changes in the environment. In any modestly challenging environment (e.g. battery powered device a few walls away from the nearest powered device) I have gotten used to having to try out multiple products before finding one that was reliable, and that was even after learning not to buy anything that wasn't at least "500 series" (Silicon Labs part number for Z-Wave Plus).

Even Enbrighten, a former GE brand and so ostensibly reputable (this of course depends on how familiar you are with the GE of today) is shipping some total garbage that they haven't even bothered to develop real documentation for. Curiously, I've found that some Enbrighten products and Zooz products are physically identical to the degree that I think they are both sourcing some of their hardware from the same manufacturer... but Zooz has very noticeably superior firmware.

no, thread is a rebranding (and evolution) of the zigbee protocol, which is a low-power, local mesh network with no inherent internet connectivity. zigbee/thread devices work offline first, with switches that are an integral part of the local mesh network. these devices can also be connected to the internet through a hub/border router, if you so choose. matter is the umbrella brand name for the combo of BLE, wifi, and thread that provides a complete IoT ecosystem.

i have a bunch of zigbee devices (mostly ikea tradfri) that i'm eager to upgrade in the hopes that i get more reliability and speed out of my connected devices (mostly lighting).

> My biggest issue with Thread is (AFAICT) it gives each device access to the internet.

Thread is a protocol, this is only as true as the statement "WiFi gives each device access to the internet".

It _can_ give devices access to the internet, but only if you plug your (border) router into an internet connection. (Or otherwise bridge the networks. Your border router could still have internet access itself without bridging the thread network out to the internet.)

In the 80s my dad controlled the lights in our home using the Radio Shack plug 'n power system. Plug-in switches and the control box would talk to each other by sending signals through the home electrical wiring.

There was no need for wifi or Bluetooth or rc or anything funky like that. It was about as dumb as a smart home could get.

http://www.trs-80.org/plug-n-power/

Being able to work without internet access is a requirement of the standard AFAICT.

>My biggest issue with Thread is (AFAICT) it gives each device access to the internet.

Uh what? This is definitely not the case with my nanoleaf bulbs..

My understanding is it gives them an IPv6 address, but that does not mean they have internet access unless there is a hub that connects between the two.

There's no WiFi, they use Zigbee behind the scenes, what changed is that they are addressed via IP, but it's still a strictly local network.

Doesn't Z-Wave require a fairly proprietary implementation, that is also having the side effect of propping up the price?

Agreed, as far as I could tell the thread border router is designed to be opaque to traffic traversing it.

I have a huge issue with this. The fact that zwave/zigbee cannot connect to the internet is why I have so many in my home and I'm not as concerned about them.

I think I remember looking at the vendors that were involved in Thread and none were privacy conscious. Apple, Google, Amazon, major Semiconductor manufacturers, Samsung, Yale. No-one who actually promotes privacy in standards.

I'm gonna guess Thread will be a privacy nightmare with the internet access making it no better than wifi. Lame.

I am so afraid of the potential of a cyber attack via IoT... with people taking image files from random spots on the dark web and writing them to their rasp pi's without looking at what's on the image, and putting random devices on their network without having any way to explore the code embedded -- it would be very easy for a widescale cyber attack to suddenly be unleashed and very suddenly we wouldn't even know what hit us.

Does it? This is a pretty big departure from Zigbee, why would they do this? It's very much an antifeature.

Note, you can always set up a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as a VLAN for your IOT stuff, and then use a proxy in case you need those to reach some servers outside. It is not a solution for always-on-internet devices, but for stuff like Shellies it works fine.

It's a real shame that home networking equipment don't have better firewalls or VLAN capabilities.

With a simple (open,pf)sense firewall, ubiquity AP you can easily configure a WiFi network that is completely internal and can talk to each other, but not to anyone else.

Isn't Thread 6LoWPAN? This should normally require a Thread to WiFi hardware gateway with a IPv4 to IPv4 gateway. I'm sure it also uses private address space.

Is it access to the internet, or access to the internet through a gateway (other than the primary router)? That's a big difference.

there's no way to turn it off or block it on a vlan?

"it gives each device access to the internet". I'm sure it's for your own good! I imagine the Matter SIG/Alliance is a who's who of data muncher and fetishists.

Let's wait and see what this thing really looks like.

It’s 900 pages long, I don’t have a good point of reference so I’ll ask. Is this a small or large reference doc compared to alternatives?

Or phrased another way. Will no name, cheap devices ever properly implement this spec?

> Underneath the hood this runs on a networking protocol called "Thread"

This is correct, but potentially leaves out a level of abstraction [1]. Matter is designed to abstract away multiple networking protocols, including Thread and Wi-Fi.

Philips Hue, for example, plans to support Matter but not Thread [2].

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[1] A bit like saying "HTTP runs on TCP". It usually does, but it's not necessary to the standard.

[2] https://matter-smarthome.de/en/interview-en/we-dont-have-pla...

I was curious how Thread compares with ZigBee in power usage.

One white paper I found suggests that Thread uses slightly less power. E.g., for a device on a CR2032 battery sending a packet every minute, with ZigBee they estimate the battery lasting 1.38 years vs 1.49 years with Thread.

https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/nwp_039.pdf

But another white paper at https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra595/swra595.pdf has them the other way around, by about the same amount.

Either way I guess it's close.

I’m always a bit confused what does thread add on top of 6LoWPAN?

What I don't like about Matter is that the participants in the standard itself don't seem to be proceeding with the ideal of having an abstract, unified control device. From a further link [1] from the posted article:

> Consumers will still need a lot of apps: One of the initial promises of Matter was that consumers would be able to add a device — like Amazon’s Echo — to their smart home controller but wouldn’t have to download a special app for every outlet or light switch they bring into the home. But at launch, and likely for a couple of years as the standard gets more robust, consumers will still need apps for anything beyond the basics, including installation. Even my panelists realized that this was the case.

I hope these companies realize that they are basically excluding themselves from a lot of potential customers by pulling this crap. I would have put smart bulbs as upscale stocking stuffers every holiday season if it wasn't for the fact that I have no idea what product / version / "ecosystem" the potential recipients use. "Just install a new app" is not a reasonable solution.

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[1] https://staceyoniot.com/5-ways-matter-will-disappoint-users-...

>Cloud dependency of many devices for the most basic functionality offered is an absolute dealbreaker for me.

Story time: My internet got taken out by a dude with a backhoe, took a week to get repaired. I then discovered that my $4k 8Sleep mattress is entirely incapable of _any_ form of local control.

I have to bounce a packet off AWS to change the temperate of my bed, on a $4k piece of hardware. (I'm not mentioning the price to brag, but to point out the absurdity).

That and they couldn't even be bothered to put an RJ-45 on the back, so it completely failed when I migrated my main wifi to WPA3.

What are you using as your Zigbee hub?

One thing I've learned over the years is that this 100% depends on you and nobody's answer will really satisfy you, because the needs and routines of every individual can be radically different.

Do you care about energy consumption? If you do, you can pull in all that information into a dashboard, evaluate your usage patterns, and craft automations that ensure you're being as efficient as you want. Turn your lights/AC/music on and off when you go from room to room, etc.

Do you care about micro-optimizing your time usage? Create automations that support your daily routine. Tie your coffee maker's smart plug to the next upcoming alarm on your smartphone so you have breakfast ready by the time you get up. Have your garage door open automatically when it's time to go to work, and it's not a holiday, and your phone is at home, and your car is in the garage.

Do you care about eye strain? Have your smart lights change colour to match the light temperature of sunlight throughout the day.

Do you care about silly things that make you feel all powerful? Have your lights turn off, some white noise start, and all the smartphones in the house switch to Do Not Disturb when you plug in your phone to charge next to your bed after 10PM.

The sky is the limit. Over the years I've ping-ponged between "eh, this is not really worth it" and "this is actually incredibly convenient" depending on how my routine has changed.

There are cool things you can do with a smarthome, like let a friend into your house remotely, but those aren't the selling features.

The selling features are the boring things. Like connecting a light switch to a lightbulb without having to pull wires through external walls. Or instead of waking up to an annoying alarm clock wake up to your blinds opening.

I plugged my dumb washing machine, dishwasher and tumble dryer into some zwave plugs which can report on energy draw. Hooked it up to Home Assistant, which is hooked up to Alexa. Now whenever any of my dumb washing machine, dishwasher or tumble dryer finish a run, it announces through my echo dot that it has finished. This is pretty useful to us as the washing machine and tumble dryer are in the garage, and the dishwasher finished beep is pretty quiet.

Honestly, there are no good applications beyond the most boring ones like turning your lights on automatically when the sun goes down.

Some people can figure out how to setup more complex things like "star my coffee when I wake up while gradually bringing the lights up" etc., but the whole experience is abysmal, and worse than Linux in the 90s: you need separate apps (or code stuff with Homebridge), all the devices have extremely limited capabilities (esp. when trying to control them centrally through e.g. Homekit), tgey are extremely brittle and disappear from your network if you look at them funny etc.

It's like Apple's Siri: good in commercials, but only good enough to set a timer. Same here: good in commercials, only good enough to turn on and off based on a simple timer.

Edit: I have a lighting setup with IKEA smart bulbs, Philips Hue lights, a smart plug on the balcony. I doubt I will ever touch another smart device beyond these.

I got a Google Home as a raffle prize and didn’t see the point.

But my house was built in the 70s and has almost 0 ceiling lights in the room. So I started buying smart outlets for the lamps so I could just turn the room off by yelling at it.

My wife switched us to Alexa because she had an app that would let her do her billing through voice (start working on John Doe’s case, stop).

I’ve expanded the lights through the house, I use routines to do stuff like turn off my bedroom light, turn on the fan, and turn on a “rain on a tent” sleep noise thing.

We use it as an intercom for the kids and to make announcements like “dinner time.”

I got an Amazon TV on prime day because it was cheap. It’s kinda handy to be able to yell at the TV when the kids lose the remote. Not super useful.

We all use the things to listen to music. I have mine paired with nice speakers in my office.

I gave up on being spied on. Everything I own is feeding back to Google, Amazon, and Apple. Probably China too with my cheap outlets.

I stick smart devices on a separate 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network that also can’t route to my main one, but that’s just to keep inevitable compromises contained and not fill my network with a bunch of chattering nonsense.

I wish Alexa would let me name it whatever I want vs the choose 1 of 3 names. There are more satisfying names to yell.

I have finally automated (a) determining that the washer has finished washing clothes (smart plug monitoring amperage highs and lows) and then (b) reminding the teenagers in my house that the washer is done and they should put their dang stuff in the dryer.

(They have not yet attained the self-awareness to set a timer on their phone, and I tire of tracking down the culprit every time I find wet clothes in the washer.)

Setup is Home Assistant Docker image on a Raspberry Pi, MQTT broker, and Tasmota firmware on the smart devices. 95% cloud free except for the push notifications.

Still determining how to solder together a safe dryer temperature sensor module to detect when the dryer is done...

> What is the coolest thing you can do with a smarthome? The single biggest selling point?

There's no single selling point.

> Seems like you can basically just control appliances from your smartphone.

That might be the case for most consumers, but it's nowhere near the end of what you can do.

One day my 3d printer was working and my robo vacuum bumped into it. I realized that it wasn't a good idea to start a vacuum run if the printer was busy. Both vacuum and printer were already connected to Home Assistant, so the fix was trivial and took a couple of minutes.

I've setup my air filter to turn on whenever the air quality drops - currently watching outside particulate levels, but I'm assembling a device that will allow me to measure inside levels.

We have two portable air conditioners in the same circuit. They can often run together - but not always. They are wired to smart outlets that measure power draw. Automation will turn one of them off if they exceed the recommended power draw - before the breaker gets unhappy. They will also be turned on automatically based on internal temp sensors. So I don't have to worry about my dog.

The important thing is to connect everything that can be connected and start streaming the data. You'll start to find plenty of situations where doing <x> when <y> will be useful. Want to dim the lights when the TV comes on? Easy. Want to turn the coffee maker on and open the blinds when you wake up? Simple. Want to postpone your dryer or washing machine when there's people around? Not a problem. Want a reminder that you forgot the garage door open, or a door open? You can do it.

But what's important to you will depend on your use-case.

I set up water sensors under the kitchen sink and in bathroom vanities. Each of them cost about $20 and integrated into my Home Assistant setup without any issues. Three months later, I was on vacation away from home and my water leak alert triggered. I was able to alert my parents, and they came back to shut the water and fix the problem before it translated into thousands of damages.

I've messed around with it a lot, and none of it is particularly life changing. You're not missing out on much by just ignoring it and living your life. With that said, I have three use cases that I enjoy a lot.

We sleep with a sound machine on. I have it set up so when the sound machine goes on, the lights in the bedroom go off and the subwoofer in the living room (adjacent to the bedroom) turns off. We tend to sleep at different times so this allows whoever is still awake to continue watching things without disturbing whoever is sleeping. I also have the outside lights set to turn on at sunset and turn off when the sound machine goes on.

For some reason the lights in my kitchen are controlled by two sets of switches on the opposite side of the room. I added a button to the kitchen island that turns every kitchen light on and off.

Finally, I have the under cabinet lights set to go on at 50% brightness when motion is detected in the kitchen after dark. That way we can grab a drink or a snack without blinding ourselves.

It's all pretty simple stuff but it's nice to have.

I've set up QoL notifications. One of my proudest compares the internal temperature of my home and the external temperature. If it's colder outside by a significant margin, I get a notification on my phone and TV letting me know so I can open my windows and get fresh air.

Other things include scheduling my lights (internal and external), unlocking my front door and garage with NFC stickers (sticker on my car dashboard or front door).

I think the problem is that it isn’t revolutionary today as the revolution the marketing is selling already happen or hasn’t yet. Mechanically and computerized monitoring and management was already available where it was most impactful. Its selling point is wireless and centralized switching but most features of the home need someone to physically be there to experience or to supply it to be useful so the advantage of signalling from a distance is mostly a plain micro luxury or moot. The robotized home to handle the inner home supply chains is the revolutionary application. It isn’t here yet but it will be advantaged by having a digitally communicable home between devices.

>What is the coolest thing you can do with a smarthome? The single biggest selling point?

I like having WRGB light bulbs everywhere that have full control via app/automation. I can wake up with "good morning" mode, have a day mode that's bright white and shifts to amber at sunset. I can go all hunt-for-red-october (pure red) late night. I can hit (or say) "goodnight" and transition the whole house to night mode, etc. Party mode is also rather fun :{

Best of all it works without having to do an expensive PoE retrofit to every switch and bulb in the entire house.

The coolest thing you can do is throw a dance party with lighting effects.

I’m not sure I would have any idea what the best thing is that you could do, however.

Control energy intensive activity like heat pumps to hours where electricity is plentiful (aka cheap). It's also literally cool when you run it in cooling mdoe.

I got into home automation because I wanted to control the temperature in my office using a plug-in electric heater and a temperature sensor. I set up a thermostat in Home Assistant that would turn on the heater when the room was cold, and turned it off once it reached the desired temperature. Then I put it on a schedule and set up some automations, so that my office would be warm by the time I got up, and the heater would turn off if I was away from home.

After that, it turned into a fun hobby. There's some cool things you can do with it, but it's just a lot of fun to write programs for my house and figure out routines and automations.

All our lights turn on automatically via motion sensors, and stay on based on bluetooth presence detection using our phones and watches. I also have a "night mode" that uses a lower brightness, and switches to using night lights in our hallway and bathrooms.

When we get up in the morning, the coffee machine turns on, the kettle starts boiling, the blinds are opened, and the TV turns on and plays a breakfast news program. (If we get up later then it chooses the TV channel on a 1 hour delay.) I set up a "movie mode" for our living room that turns off all the lights when a movie starts playing on our Roku, and turns on some dim lights when the movie is paused or stopped. We also never need to manually turn off the TV or stereo. When my wife and I both leave the living room and go downstairs, then everything turns off automatically after a few minutes (TV, stereo, any podcasts playing on an Echo, etc.)

When I walk into my office, the lights turn on, my computer wakes up, and it automatically unlocks when I'm wearing my Apple Watch. If I'm away from my office for a few minutes then the screen is locked, the lights turn off, and Spotify is paused. (Then Spotify resumes playing when I come back in, if it was previously paused by an automation.) Whenever my webcam turns on for a Zoom call, my air purifier is switched to quiet mode, and it turns off the fan in the bathroom near my office. It also turns on a ring light for better lighting, and turns it off when the call is finished.

The automations for our alarm system are really useful. Our alarm is automatically armed in "home mode" at night, and "away mode" whenever we are both away from home. It's automatically disarmed in the morning, and when we arrive home.

Our kitchen rangehood extractor fan turns on automatically when we're cooking, or if the pm25 in the kitchen goes above a certain level. Home Assistant also controls all of the heat pumps in our house, and all of our plug-in electric heaters are controlled with a thermostat that uses temp/humidity sensors.

I'm not quite finished yet - I don't have any cameras, and I want to put Amazon Kindle Fire tablets around the house to use as dashboards / controllers. It's also been surprisingly difficult to automatically open the garage door when we arrive home in the car, so I'm planning to use some ESP32s and design a secure protocol using 433 MHz transmitters/receivers. (I wasn't able to get presence detection working reliably with WiFi, even with a long-range antenna.)

Anyway, it's a hobby with lots of fun puzzles and challenges, similar to designing a Rube Goldberg machine or building a model train set. It's nothing life-changing or super important, just something fun to work on.

This workshop was incredibly educational in how matter works

https://youtu.be/9fOHBl5w0_k

> Open source reference implementation: Google, Apple, Home Assistant, we're all going to be running the same code to be a Matter controller. Chip manufacturers like Espressif and Nordic maintain implementations for their boards in there too, so anyone can now have the software to produce Matter compatible light bulbs. https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip

Will have to go through that documentation later, but are there any chips like ESP32/ESP8266 that hobbyists can use? Specifically for Thread.

Thanks, this is the first explanation I've seen of how the ecosystem actually fits together, and what Thread and Matter would mean for end users.

Do you have any fear that the connection of all these iot devices could be used in the facilitation of a widespread attack?

Also, all the devices in our homes running code which we have no way of scrutinizing. I'm a bit alarmed about that.

And the uprise in unchecked images people are flashing onto raspi's which could potentially be owned by a bad actor.

I could be paranoid, but these are things that have been on my mind.

Is there a way to force devices to use the mesh instead of going over the network? Lots of folks in this thread have concerns about allowing every lightbulb direct access to the internet and for good reason.

Wow, this post really highlights things I did not know about Matter, but which sounds great!

In all honesty, as a Home Assistant user I sort of feel that Matter/Thread is not important to me, but multi-fabric and bridges sound super nice.

Thanks for this comment - answered a lot of my questions

Matter certification requires that controllers do attestation (validate that the device says they are who they say they are) but you are allowed to offer an option to users to bypass it (like Apple does today for HomeKit today).

The official Matter SDK has examples targeting the ESP32, along with other low-cost chipsets: https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip/tree/master/...

I think the thing that clued me in was the fact that there were two people wearing sweaters knotted at the neck. One, okay, I'll allow it. Two seems like a clear signal.

The filename gives a clue: AdobeStock_204738243

Yes! It's maintained by the members of the CSA alliance (which authors Matter). It means that Google, Apple and Home Assistant will all run the same controller code and benefit from bug fixes. Chip manufacturers like Espressif and Nordic maintain implementations for their boards in there too, so anyone can now have the software to produce Matter compatible light bulbs.

https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip

I also found the headline annoyingly vague / completely lacking in any useful information, and presuming it to be a big deal somehow, I clicked and was immediately greeted by fullscreen Stacey-whatever-spam.

Not going to do that again, and I still have no idea what this crap is even after scrolling through a ton of comments to reach yours with a similar experience.

Edit: Now I see on the front page a second link, "Matter – The Foundation for Connected Things (csa-iot.org)" which at least has IoT in the URL. Three whole bytes across two separate front page items doing any work to convey what's going on...

As an Home Automation consumer, that hates cloud required products

The list of companies in the alliance has given me great pause that it is good thing. It is a who's who of "evil" anti-consumer companies that love vendor and cloud lockin, many of which have been open hostile to projects like Home Assistance which puts the user/consumer in control of their data

Matter is higher level than both wifi and Bluetooth, so yeah you will need "something" to communicate over, which will be IP. Thread for example which is sort of zigbee.