I recently made some progress with my home automation system (see blog article and blog article). Along the way I started to learn about a new free and open-source standard called “Matter” that will hopefully simplify the “last 50 feet” problem in home automation.
For decades the way it has worked is that every company that makes devices for home owners thinks it is smarter than everybody else about how to solve the “last 50 feet” problem. If the company makes light switches, then it includes a proprietary hub or controller in the system that is centrally located and that communicates with each of the light switches. The company devises some proprietary wireless protocol to be used for those fifty feet. Legrand, a maker of light switches, devised its “RFLC” protocol using 900-MHz data packets. Lutron, a maker of window shades and light switches, devised its “Radio Ra 2” protocol using 444.92-MHz data packets. And so on and so on. Of course this means that when the home owner installs another light switch or another window shade or another thermostat in the house, the home owner must use some ecosystem-specific sequence of steps to link up that new device with that company’s proprietary cloud.
The new Matter standard (Wikipedia article) hopes to simplify this. The idea is that this last 50 feet of wireless communication would be carried out using any of several free and open-source standard protocols. What’s more, instead of having to deploy half a dozen or more separate hubs and controllers, one for each proprietary “last 50 feet” protocols, the home owner might be able to get by with a single “Matter controller”.
The two blog articles (blog article and blog article) mentioned above describe my recent deployment of a Home Assistant (“HA”) server in my house, and my migration of many legacy proprietary home automation ecosystems in my house over to this HA system. It will not surprise the reader to learn that the HA system is able to serve as a single “Matter controller” for the house.
My suggestion is that anybody who is building a new house, or who is planning to replace or update some home automation devices in the house, ought to give a lot of thought to choosing “Matter”-enabled devices.
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