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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • It is highly unlikely you will get such a device in less than 3 years for the simple reason that it has a constant power supply greater than 2 watts. In that scenario, it should either be wifi for the range or act as a wifi/thread bridge (aka border router) to augment the thread mesh without the homeowner needing to worry about their existing mesh*. In either case, control would happen over wifi.

    The CSA (Matter management group) needs to increase the number of wifi/thread bridges on the market to make battery-powered Thread-only devices viable. This is a greater priority than having mains-powered Matter devices that can only act as thread relays.

    *Thread relays have the same issue as zwave/zigbee relays: you have to daisy chain them across your home to extend the mesh contiguously. This means some people need to put relays in places they don’t need any functionality other than to be a range extender. With wifi/thread bridges you can use wifi’s orders of magnitude greater power budget to extend the Thread network in a non-contiguous fashion.


  • This is a Matter device, right? Well, Matter doesn’t support power monitoring. Just like Matter lights don’t support dynamic events.

    One theory is that Google and/or Amazon weren’t prepared to support power monitoring based events or dynamic lighting so they voted it down. Another theory is that endpoint device manufacturers intentionally removed a key feature from the spec to ensure you would still need their app/cloud so they could have vendor lock-in/data harvesting/etc. Third theory is “Why not both?”

    Despite Matter having been hobbled, it is still the best IoT mass-market solution as when Meross inevitably obsoletes these devices, they will still be locally controllable. (Some would argue an MQTT based solution is better but as there’s no 3rd party validation, you can get insecure products like the Nexx garage door opener)

    I , however, detest IoT and stick with zwave devices, which have no innate ability to be on the internet, can’t get firmware “downgrades” or be hobbled by a cloud outage and all get 3rd party validation.