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Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

I thought Threads was already the next generation of zigbee.

I hope Zigbee stays. It’s widely used and works really well. Matter may be even better but it also makes it really hard for manufacturers to actually make products that can be sold cheaply. Zigbee is just good enough and I believe the push to replace it has ulterior motives.

Yeah, same. Zigbee hits the sweet spot of offline and just interoperable enough. Matter has added so many features that I might as well just use WiFi devices, and it doesn't sound like the consortium has the customer's best interests in mind.

Yeah, I can just not wrap my brain around the Thread and Matter push. Zigbee works great, devices are affordable, there are many devices out there already. Also people who already have Zigbee will have to build an additional Thread mesh. This all seems so pointless unless there is another motive.

Zigbee is indeed good enough. The issue is that it solves the problem well enough and doesn't allow for maximizing how much customers are milked for. So customers will always choose Zigbee over any other option that also solves the problem plus some useless features, less control, and increased security surface area.

There is a very clear signal that is easy to pick up: either you support zigbee in your IoT device or you are trying to undermine the customer. No customer wants to be undermined. This should make Zigbee support a very easy choice for companies operating in a competitive space. Simply succeeding in the market should be enough and if it isn't that is the company's existential challenge.

IMO Thread has one major benefit over Zigbee: the Thread mesh can extend over Ethernet (via TREL). Zigbee ought to be able to do this too, but I’m not aware of anyone actually doing it.

There are a couple of in-progress implementations of Zigbee on a regular computer using Thread radios and the Thread RCP protocol. Maybe one of them will add the ability to use multiple radios.

I think it's a feature to enforce network segregation and have gateways be intentionally chosen. IoT devices are known to be high-risk security. We should shape the solutions such that the minimal energy path is a good one.

Huh?

If I have one building with one automation system but the building is too physically large or has walls that attenuate RF too much or where I don’t want a router node in the middle or where the latency across a mesh is too high, I want to be able to extend the network at low latency by plugging in another network-attached radio base station but without needing to manually pair each device to the closest base station.

Thread does this out of the box. Zigbee does not.

The good thing is that at least for a somewhat technical crowd, there is absolutely no need to buy into any of this, as there have been proper solutions available since at least 2018.

Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.

Oh cool it's not just me doing exactly this.

Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.

Are the ikea zigbee devices going to stop being sold? Massive shame if so, they are extremely reliable and easy to use.

IKEA's whole smart home ecosystem is presently being overhauled from Zigbee to Thread/Matter, with a product availability gap in the meantime.

https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/retail/the-new-smart...

Oooh, thank you for sharing! New product lineup looks interesting, but I echo other concerns here about it thread maybe eventually requiring internet.

I just bought some spare pieces (remotes, bulbs) just in case

What gap though? Our local IKEA has plenty of lights, smart plugs, etc. available still.

Personally, I find their contact sensors (the tall-ish thin ones) to be quite unreliable. I live in a modest home with plenty of zigbee devices as repeaters nearby and the contact sensors often stop reporting at random. I’ll pop it off the door, click repair on my coordinator and then hit the reset switch on the sensor; back online.

I like them because they can use rechargeable AAA batteries but if I still have to touch them every few weeks to repair, I’d rather switch to a different brand that is more reliable and uses less ideal battery formats.

That said, the newish Inspelling plugs in the EU market are fantastic. They report reliably, can handle larger loads, and cost about €10. For that price, it’s hard to complain that they are a bit larger than other options.

Side question but where would one learn how to do this that way? Any guides, reddit? The home automation market seems such a mess every time I check it out.

Feed that comment into an ai (claude suggested). Let it know what you have, and just work out a "numbered list roadmap". Love ais for that!

Easiest way is to put HAOS (Home Assistant OS) on a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant Green, or some NUC:

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

Then get a coordinator recommended for zigbee2mqtt:

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/

Then install and start the following add-ons in Home Assistant:

- Mosquitto - zigbee2mqtt: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/installation/03_ha_addon.ht... - MQTT

And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.

You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.

> Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.

The only worry is if manufacturers stop developing Zigbee products. Ikea for example made cheap and good Zigbee devices but they've said they're moving away from Zigbee.

> Threads

You mean "Thread"? Or "Matter over Thread", which some vendors also just call "Matter" (which technically can also stand on it's own, but in many cases implies a Thread requirement). I'm wondering if that muddiness in bad communication will be a significant factor in hindering consumer adoption.

"Matter" can in practice also mean "Matter over Wi-Fi", and lots of vendors use it that way.

That’s my issue with it: iot devices shouldn’t have access to the internet by default. With Matter it’s possible. No one is going to create outbound firewall rules for these things.

I think it's only a matter of time before it's the same for Thread + Matter. Currently they get an ULA IPv6 address on (most?) border routers and you can ping the devices on the local network. It will be too attractive extend the standard to permit phoning home for 'analytics to improve the product' (I don't think this is possible yet with the current standard? But hard to tell.).

More power usage though.

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