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New unifying standard

firstone

By firstone
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firstone Advanced

firstone

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I'm as skeptical as any other guy to put it mildly. But there are "standards" out there that (semi)work - USB, HDMI, etc. The situation with HA market sucks. A lot of smaller "cloud" start ups with their own proprietary APIs and always connected IOT devices that cannot be controlled without their cloud. Just look at the number of discount wifi RGB lights available. Every company wants to release their version of connected light and outlet. Their imagination seems to run out after that. At least they all seems to "work with alexa".

Michel Kohanim Wise Elder

Michel Kohanim

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@firstone,

I agree but partially. The reason is that all the standards that you mentioned are hardware related: little room for variations. Better analogies are IP, TLS, HTTP,  and perhaps XML/HTML. But, even then: IP (in all its forms) defines a very narrow view of the domain and what it solves. Same as HTTP and TLS. On the other hand, HTML defines the broadest possible domain. In all cases, though, the use cases were pretty well defined so that these standards and/or specs could flourish. 

In contrast, Smart Home is not well defined. Even their mission statement is not well defined: it mostly talks about using IP and security. How about payloads? What does interoperability mean? You can securely ping devices? 

Since I was intimately involved in at least two of these Smart Home bodies (a co-chairman of IPSO with the same exact mission), I just have a little more pessimistic view of this subject.

Wtih kind regards,
Michel

lilyoyo1 Advanced

lilyoyo1

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2 hours ago, firstone said:

I'm as skeptical as any other guy to put it mildly. But there are "standards" out there that (semi)work - USB, HDMI, etc. The situation with HA market sucks. A lot of smaller "cloud" start ups with their own proprietary APIs and always connected IOT devices that cannot be controlled without their cloud. Just look at the number of discount wifi RGB lights available. Every company wants to release their version of connected light and outlet. Their imagination seems to run out after that. At least they all seems to "work with alexa".

As Michel pointed out those are hardware standards. Even then (Hdmi for example), can be a mess. Its not even the lack of imagination. At the end of the day its the same as what I say about switches...They turn on/off/and dim. What more can you really add? All these products are being created that add nothing to move things forward. Even feature rich products are half baked.

This move reminds me of all that was promised with zigbee and zwave. IInstead of a open platform where products all work together easily, you have mfg. supporting different attributes, differing scene classes, parameters, etc. This product works with hue because it uses this zigbee but not this zigbee product because it uses that zigbee firmware. Both zigbee and zwave had/have the potential to be great. Unfortunately once mfg. got their hands on things, they turned it into a bad thing.

The problem I have with things is that each company has their own agenda and product lines to protect. Financially it doesnt make any sense to play nice with each other. What I see happening is a common layer with each supporting basic details (such as the security layer) in order to make things work. For example, It would not surprise me to see Nest products easy work with Amazon and Apple at a basic level; but the best features withheld for googles ecosystem.

 

 

firstone Advanced

firstone

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14 hours ago, lilyoyo1 said:

This move reminds me of all that was promised with zigbee and zwave. IInstead of a open platform where products all work together easily, you have mfg. supporting different attributes, differing scene classes, parameters, etc. This product works with hue because it uses this zigbee but not this zigbee product because it uses that zigbee firmware. Both zigbee and zwave had/have the potential to be great. Unfortunately once mfg. got their hands on things, they turned it into a bad thing.

 

What gives me a slim glimmer of hope is that this new standard supposed to be open. I don't know much about zigbee but z-wave is anything but. I believe there's significant expense involved in being able to get into z-wave infrastructure. And the API and libs aren't available to average developer. Unless you count reverse engineered "open z-wave" lib. I believe @Michel Kohanim mentioned likewise about apple home kit in the past, if I'm not mistaken. So if there's even flawed but widely available standard, it's still better than nothing. Notice how maybe of those run of the mill direct from china products "work with Alexa". Because Amazon makes it very easy to integrate with, providing APIs, documentation, etc. This direction Amazon took with making their services and APIs potentially available to clients came from Bezos himself at some point, BTW.

simplextech Advanced

simplextech

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9 minutes ago, firstone said:

What gives me a slim glimmer of hope is that this new standard supposed to be open. I don't know much about zigbee but z-wave is anything but. I believe there's significant expense involved in being able to get into z-wave infrastructure. And the API and libs aren't available to average developer. Unless you count reverse engineered "open z-wave" lib. I believe @Michel Kohanim mentioned likewise about apple home kit in the past, if I'm not mistaken. So if there's even flawed but widely available standard, it's still better than nothing. Notice how maybe of those run of the mill direct from china products "work with Alexa". Because Amazon makes it very easy to integrate with, providing APIs, documentation, etc. This direction Amazon took with making their services and APIs potentially available to clients came from Bezos himself at some point, BTW.

I doubt anything from the Big 3 will be "open".

However SiLabs and the Z-Wave Alliance have announced that Z-Wave is now going to be Open.

Quote

Today, Silicon Labs and the Z-Wave Alliance announced plans to open the Z-Wave Specification as a ratified, multi-source wireless standard available to all silicon and stack vendors for development to continue to drive the smart home ecosystem. With this change, semiconductor and software suppliers will be able to join the Alliance and contribute to future advancements of the leading smart home standard and develop and supply sub-GHz Z-Wave radio devices and software stacks.

Not much details in the remainder of the e-mail but more info coming and probably a public press on it at CES soon.

lilyoyo1 Advanced

lilyoyo1

Posted
Posted
12 minutes ago, firstone said:

What gives me a slim glimmer of hope is that this new standard supposed to be open. I don't know much about zigbee but z-wave is anything but. I believe there's significant expense involved in being able to get into z-wave infrastructure. And the API and libs aren't available to average developer. Unless you count reverse engineered "open z-wave" lib. I believe @Michel Kohanim mentioned likewise about apple home kit in the past, if I'm not mistaken. So if there's even flawed but widely available standard, it's still better than nothing. Notice how maybe of those run of the mill direct from china products "work with Alexa". Because Amazon makes it very easy to integrate with, providing APIs, documentation, etc. This direction Amazon took with making their services and APIs potentially available to clients came from Bezos himself at some point, BTW.

Both zigbee and Zwave are already open source. The problem is that everyone wants to break it up to fit their needs.

Don't get me wrong, I want to be proven wrong on this. I think it would be great. History has shown is that this just isn't the case. I can see some things such as security being standardized but technically that's already the case. Most players just don't want to implement it which is the problem. Depending on use case, I can see this most likely becoming another forked standard so that none of the company's damage their bottom line

  • 2 weeks later...
Tuckerdude Newbie

Tuckerdude

Posted
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Hey Folks...Happy New Year!

My two cents...I'm with Michel on this one! I've been into this whole HA thing since the 80s (X-10 Baby), and throughout all these years there was always the dream of a "Universal Standard".

For the longest time, I kept praying for something to stick to the wall that all the hardware manufacturers would get behind. But it's just not in the cards...and these days, I'm not sure it would make sense anyway. Too many competing agendas, too much emphasis on owning customer data/monetization. Waaaaay too much emphasis on the cloud and owning the entire eco-system. I just don't see any scenario where these guys TRULY want things to be open. It goes against the very core of their business philosophy.

This is why I'm so happy to see that the Polisy product has finally come out. It gives me hope that I can bridge the gap across all of these devices and API's and create my own "smorgasbord" of switches, lights, sensors, cameras, and media components. And I will do so with as little reliance on the cloud as I can possibly muster. To date I've managed to stay away from cloud-based hardware with the exception of Echo devices. But at some point, voice command and control will not need a cloud back-end to work (WELL), and then I will migrate that to my local network.

Again..just my two cents!

Cheers....

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