I’m just getting into this whole smart home thing, I recently got some smart wing matter blinds. I have zero clue which hub to get, I honestly have no desire for any voice automation and have zero apple ecosystem in my house but I see a lot of people pointing to an apple TV box? Is there any other solid recommendations out there? I saw habitat seems pretty popular here too but there’s zero mention of matter support on their site.
It’s actually not a hub, but a controller that you need. Semantics, but important when you are talking about Matter.
If you don’t have any Apple products, then, obviously don’t go there.
I see a lot in here about Home Assistant. I have an Apple Home, but I have been using Home Assistant for energy management recently. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but it is a huge upfront investment in terms of learning it. It is NOT plug and play. I say this being person with a great deal of technical background.
So, if not Home Assistant, there are other companies that support Matter.
The big ones are Amazon, Google and Samsung SmartThings.
Pick your poison… but what you need to look at is the rollout of support for Matter devices.
e.g. initially Amazon only supported WiFi and added Thread later.
I’m not sure that Google are supporting all device types yet, which is kind of funny as there aren’t that many devices types out there in the real world yet.
SmartThings seems to be really on board, but I see loads of people giving up on ST and moving to HA… but if you have a lot of Samsung devices then you could be good to go. Indeed, certain TV’s and fridges can already act as a Family Hub/Matter Controller.
Obviously, with Amazon, you have to deal with the massive invasion of privacy that is Amazon.
The Hubitat c8 is matter compatible but it’s not enabled yet. Matter is currently available for beta testers only. You can request access to the beta but have to be approved. When they released the hub in march, they said matter was coming later this year, so unless something changed it should be here soon.
Matter is still mostly irrelevant and the current trend doesn’t give us any indication when/if this will change. Good to have the support in a hub but is the least important for making this work today.
As for HA, that is the best bet in general if you want to ensure the broadest range of support of devices but you need to be a person who has the desire to get into technical bits, and spend a notable amount of upfront time learning, as that can be required. It is currently much, much better than it has been but HA is still not a fully plug-it-in-and-go general consumer device.
If all you want to do is control your blinds remotely, I’m assuming they have an app for them for your phone. Others can be more helpful if you specify what the blinds are, what other things you currently have that are connected/smart that you want to control, how you want to control them (schedule time of day, specific event, etc) what your phone and voice assistants are (if you have any), and what you think you might want to do in the future.
There is a Matter Integration for Home Assistant in Beta (Matter itself is more or less in Beta)
I ordered a Home Assistant Green with Skyconnect. I have some Matter devices that I wanted to connect. But I won’t get the Skyconnect until a few weeks later I think.
So is the HA OS itself a Matter controller that I can use to pair matter devices or do I need to wait for the Skyconnect to do that?
Home Assistant is a Matter controller, so any wifi based Matter devices will work right away. If it’s a thread/matter device you will need Skyconnect or some other thread border router so HA can talk to it, and then HA can act as the Matter controller.
The only thing you need to have a good experience with an Apple TV is an iPhone or iPad.