Googling didn't reveal any useful answer, did anybody know it has an article about what's the advantage of matter vs mqtt?
So, if I'm invested in zigbee, but want to future proof, I should consider threads/matter, and a hub that talks to both?
Can home assistant do that?
Yes if you have a Zigbee and a Thread antenna module connected to your HA instance you can run it as an Zigbee and Matter hub and connect Zigbee and Matter devices. A cheap antenna module is the Sonoff ZBDongle-E. You can flash the firmware of it and turn it into a Thread antenna module. It can also run as a Zigbee and Thread antenna simultaneously, but I never got that working properly. So I just bought two dongles. One for Zigbee and the other for Matter.
Thanks. I'll look into it. Right now I have mainly lights and sockets, through a Lidl zigbee hub, a rebranded Tuya, I believe, but I'm looking into going a bit deeper.
Hows that working software-wise in HA? One running in Z2M, the other ZHA?
finally!! :D
Man there are way too many IoT standards. What's the difference between these two? How do they each compare to Matter?
Thread is a wireless standard meant to sit next to Bluetooth and WiFi.
Matter is a home automation protocol can that be used over Thread or WiFi. Ideal Matter devices use Thread instead of WiFi because running a bunch of home devices like light bulbs or switches on your WiFi is a recipe for disaster.
Matter is important because it provides native compatibility among different platforms.
An important difference between thread and zigbee/wi-fi I'm not seeing mentioned is that all thread devices automesh in a hub/spoke model as long as they're not battery powered. So your light bulbs, plugs, etc all become extenders and part of a self healing mesh network without a single point of failure. For me it works better than Zigbee for this reason.
Thread also works on the 2.4 GHz range but can utilize sub ranges of 868 in Europe and 915 in north America. The 868 and 915 GHz ranges are what LoRa operates on and provides a much greater range for low data rate transmissions.
In fact Meshtastic operates on LoRa on 915 here in the U.S. and I have a node in my second floor window with a 3db antenna and I have been able to message both ways up to 3 blocks away.
Long story short, utilizing 868 and 915 in these devices will make dead spots a thing of the past within a home, even with their lower gain internal antennas.
Zigbee does that too tho, right?
The wiki on zigbee says so at least
Pretty sure than an underlying feature of both zigbee and zwave.
They're different in their implementation. Zigbee automesh is more of a centralized router-hub model with self healing relying on routing tables. This caused significant issues for me. Thread is true automesh with all devices acting as a hub in a hub/spoke model, so there's no centralized routing table to act as a single point of failure.
I exclusively use ZigBee. It automeshes.
Thread is a network layer thing, comparable to WiFi or Bluetooth. Matter is an application later thing, comparable to HomeKit or Google home.
Zigbee is both network and application layer.
This article has a decent overview https://www.smarthomeperfected.com/zigbee-vs-thread/
I am pretty happy with zigbee so far. Is that a good thing? I haven‘t done anything with matter so far.
It's just a technological step forward. Thread was designed from the ground up as an IPv6 protocol. Honestly, this kind of move is coming later than would have been ideal, given the massive growth in IoT devices.
Crap. I use pretty much exclusively Ikea stuff with my Home Assistant
It's not like it'll stop working once this is introduced
Isn't the HA cloud dongle able to do both because they're on the same 2.4 gigahertz or whatever?
The dual stack firmware was deprecated because of issues, I believe.
It's still marked as experimental, not deprecated, just will likely stay that way. However, it does work with both protocols individually, and the first-use wizard asks you which dedicated firmware you would like to install:
https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/articles/26124710072861-Enabling-Thread-support
My understanding is that you can replace the ZigBee firmware with Threads firmware if you want.
Yeah, that's what it looks like to me as well, but since I'm currently using Zigbee devices, I would need to either move them to a new hub, or get a second cloud connect, ZBT1, so that one could be dedicated for threads and the other could be dedicated to Zigbee.
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