5 ms·

Matter Raspberry Pi GPIO Commander – Turn Your Pi into a Matter Lighting Device

43 points by sowbug 3y ago

CyberDildonics 3y ago
This link says "Matter lighting device" over and over but never says what that means and there are no pictures.
- breckenedge 3y ago
  Matter is the protocol that’s going to replace the vendor-specific protocols for Apple, Amazon and Google smart home devices.
  - marketingLizard 3y ago
    What's their objection to using universal, free and open protocols? Just standard lack of options to exploit users?
    - efitz 3y ago
      Uhh, Matter is that protocol.
      - Xelynega 3y ago
        Eh, matter is the xkcd#927 of "that protocol". UDMI/DTDL/Watson/matter/ZigBee all try to do "universal device management over a single API", matter is just the latest incarnation. Matter is already 20gb and suffering from API sprawl before it's even released. I don't think it has much of a future as "that protocol" beyond whatever corporate life support its on.
    - greggsy 3y ago
      The matter and thread protocols eliminates the walled garden issues that lock you into those ecosystems, and promises greater interoperability. It’s intended to be universal.
      - manv1 3y ago
        Matter will lock you into the ecosystem promoted by Apple and Google instead of the ecosystem promoted by the Z-Wave alliance.
        greggsy 3y ago
        Consumers want support and choice, neither of which are offered in the open ecosystem. Matter bridges the gap across all three big players.
        manv1 3y ago
        That's a load of bullshit. With Z-Wave I have a pick of over 20-30 vendors. Z-Wave is just as open as Matter. It's just not controlled by Google and/or Apple.
        greggsy 3y ago
        You may have choice, but a vast proportion of the market aren’t even aware of it, and wouldn’t know where to buy it. They see, understand, and seek out the branding for the ecosystem that they use already. This is unfortunate, as I like free and open as much as the next HN user, but it’s the nature of innovation and socio-technical ecosystems.
    - manv1 3y ago
      I suspect it's a combination of NIH and the big players wanting to control the certification process and chip supply. Z-Wave has been working perfectly fine for years. There have been protocol upgrades, new hardware, a pretty large ecosystem, etc. Zigbee apparently suffers from interop problems.
    - omnicognate 3y ago
      In my limited understanding there are two levels to it. At the network level, plain Wi-Fi doesn't really cut it. To get reliable connections with lightbulbs and stuff you need a mesh network where each thing connects to nearby things and they form a network among themselves. That requires a wireless transport designed for the purpose. Zigbee is one such transport, and Thread (awful name) is a new one. Both are open standards, but the main advantage of Thread is that it doesn't need a central hub. It just needs a "border router" to talk to other networks (if things need to). Thread is based on IPv6. At the application level, you need a protocol for controlling IoT stuff, that knows about those kinds of devices and allows an application to, for example, tell a lighbulb what colour to be. This has been done with vendor-specific protocols to date, over UDP or HTTP or whatever. Matter (also an awful name) is a new open standard for it. It can work over any IP network, including Thread ones (or WiFi or ethernet or whatever). So between them, Matter and Thread should provide standards based connectivity and control for IoT devices, and as a key design requirement they should allow it all to work locally, i.e. without the cloud connection so many vendors have forced on people. They seem like Good Things to me. The above is just what I've picked up and may contain inaccuracies, which I would appreciate being corrected upon.
- detaro 3y ago
  Matter is a recent-ish "smart home" protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) This apparently allows to have an RPi act like a lamp-type device in that protocol, with control over the GPIOs
  - garphunkle 3y ago
    Matter came around after I left, but I believe it is the same as CHIP: * IEEE 802.15.4 (2.4 GHz PHY/MAC) * 6LowPAN (IPv6 for constrained devies) * Thread (Mesh network layer) * UDP or CoAP (CoAP is like http for connectionless networks) You need a bridge to connect CHIP to the internet (e.g. Apple Home). It was cool to route IP packets directly to lightbulbs from aws, but we don't bridge the networks in practice and all incoming/outgoing traffic goes through the bridge application.
    - detaro 3y ago
      Matter is the protocol running on top of IP, so it runs over Ethernet in the example (since the Pi doesn't speak 802.15.4)
detaro 3y ago
blog post might be slightly better starting point: https://ubuntu.com/blog/matter-on-ubuntu-getting-started https://ubuntu.com/blog/matter-on-ubuntu-getting-started
- neilv 3y ago
  ubuntu.com bad-faith cookie-consent UI. We should start pushing back against that, and maybe stop linking sites that do it.
dcj4 3y ago
> This small application > switch an LED or another device via a relay > requires around 8GB of disk space Bit late for april fools'
- anamexis 3y ago
  The disk space requirement is to build it yourself from scratch.
  - efitz 3y ago
    I went to the matter web site and followed the instructions to install the SDK on a raspberry pi. I didn’t measure how much space it took but it installed dozens (hundreds?) of packages; it is extreme bloatware.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    It takes 13 GB to build yourself the entirety of Chromium, this is has no right to be anywhere close.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    That's still insane, you could build an operating system from scratch with that amount of space. All this does is toggle a pin on and off.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Especially when a much cheaper ESP32 can do the same thing. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-matter/en/main/esp32/ https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-matter/en/main/esp32...
causality0 3y ago
A pi seems like a crazy amount of muscle just to toggle a couple pins. Not to mention cost. Is this not a job for an ESP32?
- sowbug 3y ago
  The project is the IoT equivalent of a blink sketch.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    What's the scaled up version that wouldn't also be better suited to an ESP32?
iaw 3y ago
Just as an FYI if you're like me and wanted a Raspberry Pi for something like PiHole but don't want to pay insane prices there are tons of clones out there like the Orange Pi (or just google "Raspberry Pi Alternatives")
- smcleod 3y ago
  RockPi's are also a great open if you want higher performance.
0x000xca0xfe 3y ago
(Context: Matter is an application layer protocol to control smart home devices, bring them into your Wifi or Thread network, and they ought to work with Homekit/Google Home/Alexa/Smartthings/Home Assistant etc. at the same time) I'm currently working on a Matter device myself and the overengineering is unreal. The idea is great (standardized messages over IP, no internet required, open source SDK on Github) but if they had just used MQTT with some standardized JSON messages and two or three fixed onboarding flows it would have solved the same problems with 1% of the effort. But now the project is absolutely massive, almost 1k pages for the base spec, 1M+ lines of (mostly C++) code for the core SDK, no stable or even well defined API, almost no documentation. Progress is glacial, unsuprisingly. Bug fixes do not seem to be backported to older release branches but there is no source code compatibility either, so the security story will be interesting for sure... Most discussions seem to happen on an internal Discord server and Wiki for paying members only, so the project is not that open either. I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes...
- cryo 3y ago
  Last time I cloned the repository it was already over 20 GB, holy ***. Having read the spec up and down a few times I think it's sound, my main complain would be the device attestation and blockchain usage for OTA. Also Matter inherited the very same thing that sucked most for Zigbee: manufacturer specific "enhancements" are valid, what could possibly go wrong.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes... Do we need a new thing? ZigBee and mqtt already exist. Maybe something a little nicer over IP networks?
  - westurner 3y ago
    "Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186286 From https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#architecture-overview https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#architecture... : > Matter aims to build a universal IPv6-based communication protocol for smart home devices. The protocol defines the application layer that will be deployed on devices and the different link layers to help maintain interoperability. The following diagram illustrates the normal operational mode of the stack: > [...] It is built with market-proven technologies using Internet Protocol (IP) and is compatible with Thread and Wi-Fi network transports. > Matter was developed by a Working Group within the Connectivity Standards Alliance (Alliance). This Working Group develops and promotes the adoption of the Matter standard, a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. The vision that led major industry players to come together to build Matter is that smart connectivity should be simple, reliable, and interoperable. > [...] The code examples show simple interactions, and are supported on multiple transports -- Wi-Fi and Thread -- starting with resource-constrained (i.e., memory, processing) silicon platforms to help ensure Matter’s scalability. Would it make sense to have an mqtt transport for matter? Or a bridge; like homeassistant or similar? https://github.com/home-assistant/core#featured-integrations https://github.com/home-assistant/core#featured-integrations lists mqtt Is there already a good (security) comparison of e.g. http basic auth, x10, ZigBee, mqtt, matter?
FpUser 3y ago
With the current prices Pi makes no sense
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
I was disappointed when I saw that Matter chose to go with Thread. It's pretty terrible, even for home usage. I managed a solution that was initially based on Thread but moved it over to a proprietary 802.15.4 protocol. - Entire network runs on a single radio channel... not very resistant to interference. Good luck in congested environments. Other protocols channel hop. - Only had 15ish channels you can operate on as opposed to other protocols that have up to 40. - If you have a lot of devices on the network, it can take hours for the mesh to form / re-form. - Horrible for battery powered devices. You get contention with a lot of and or chatty devices. There's no scheduling for transmitting so you have to "listen" with your receiver on until you "hear" nothing, then you transmit. Switching to a protocol that uses time slotting more than doubled our device's battery life.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  Damn, I had hope for Thread. I was hoping for something that works as well as Zigbee, but I can actually use. The documentation of OpenThread is amazing, so I was excited. > a proprietary 802.15.4 protocol A licensed existing solution or something custom? > Switching to a protocol that uses time slotting more than doubled our device's battery life. Do you think this applies to most use cases?
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
    >A licensed existing solution or something custom? We went with something licensed. >Do you think this applies to most use cases? I should have included "time slotting AND channel hopping." Given how congested the 2.4GHz band is, I think it does apply to a lot of battery powered use cases (especially wearables). Some use cases see a far greater benefit than others. The deployment environment also plays a big part. If you have a lot of traffic on a channel, the radio hops to another channel so there's reduced error rates (reduced transmission reattempts = saved energy). If you have a quiet radio environment and a lot of devices that communicate infrequently or a very small number of devices on the mesh, you may not see a huge benefit. One downside of a time slot channel hopping protocol is that you need a more expensive crystal in your hardware for accurate time keeping/scheduling. Upside is that you have a reduced total cost of ownership as you need to buy fewer replaceable batteries.

43 points by sowbug 3y ago

CyberDildonics 3y ago

This link says "Matter lighting device" over and over but never says what that means and there are no pictures.

breckenedge 3y ago
Matter is the protocol that’s going to replace the vendor-specific protocols for Apple, Amazon and Google smart home devices.
- marketingLizard 3y ago
  What's their objection to using universal, free and open protocols? Just standard lack of options to exploit users?
  - efitz 3y ago
    Uhh, Matter is that protocol.
    - Xelynega 3y ago
      Eh, matter is the xkcd#927 of "that protocol". UDMI/DTDL/Watson/matter/ZigBee all try to do "universal device management over a single API", matter is just the latest incarnation. Matter is already 20gb and suffering from API sprawl before it's even released. I don't think it has much of a future as "that protocol" beyond whatever corporate life support its on.
  - greggsy 3y ago
    The matter and thread protocols eliminates the walled garden issues that lock you into those ecosystems, and promises greater interoperability. It’s intended to be universal.
    - manv1 3y ago
      Matter will lock you into the ecosystem promoted by Apple and Google instead of the ecosystem promoted by the Z-Wave alliance.
      - greggsy 3y ago
        Consumers want support and choice, neither of which are offered in the open ecosystem. Matter bridges the gap across all three big players.
        manv1 3y ago
        That's a load of bullshit. With Z-Wave I have a pick of over 20-30 vendors. Z-Wave is just as open as Matter. It's just not controlled by Google and/or Apple.
        greggsy 3y ago
        You may have choice, but a vast proportion of the market aren’t even aware of it, and wouldn’t know where to buy it. They see, understand, and seek out the branding for the ecosystem that they use already. This is unfortunate, as I like free and open as much as the next HN user, but it’s the nature of innovation and socio-technical ecosystems.
  - manv1 3y ago
    I suspect it's a combination of NIH and the big players wanting to control the certification process and chip supply. Z-Wave has been working perfectly fine for years. There have been protocol upgrades, new hardware, a pretty large ecosystem, etc. Zigbee apparently suffers from interop problems.
  - omnicognate 3y ago
    In my limited understanding there are two levels to it. At the network level, plain Wi-Fi doesn't really cut it. To get reliable connections with lightbulbs and stuff you need a mesh network where each thing connects to nearby things and they form a network among themselves. That requires a wireless transport designed for the purpose. Zigbee is one such transport, and Thread (awful name) is a new one. Both are open standards, but the main advantage of Thread is that it doesn't need a central hub. It just needs a "border router" to talk to other networks (if things need to). Thread is based on IPv6. At the application level, you need a protocol for controlling IoT stuff, that knows about those kinds of devices and allows an application to, for example, tell a lighbulb what colour to be. This has been done with vendor-specific protocols to date, over UDP or HTTP or whatever. Matter (also an awful name) is a new open standard for it. It can work over any IP network, including Thread ones (or WiFi or ethernet or whatever). So between them, Matter and Thread should provide standards based connectivity and control for IoT devices, and as a key design requirement they should allow it all to work locally, i.e. without the cloud connection so many vendors have forced on people. They seem like Good Things to me. The above is just what I've picked up and may contain inaccuracies, which I would appreciate being corrected upon.
detaro 3y ago
Matter is a recent-ish "smart home" protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) This apparently allows to have an RPi act like a lamp-type device in that protocol, with control over the GPIOs
- garphunkle 3y ago
  Matter came around after I left, but I believe it is the same as CHIP: * IEEE 802.15.4 (2.4 GHz PHY/MAC) * 6LowPAN (IPv6 for constrained devies) * Thread (Mesh network layer) * UDP or CoAP (CoAP is like http for connectionless networks) You need a bridge to connect CHIP to the internet (e.g. Apple Home). It was cool to route IP packets directly to lightbulbs from aws, but we don't bridge the networks in practice and all incoming/outgoing traffic goes through the bridge application.
  - detaro 3y ago
    Matter is the protocol running on top of IP, so it runs over Ethernet in the example (since the Pi doesn't speak 802.15.4)

detaro 3y ago

blog post might be slightly better starting point: https://ubuntu.com/blog/matter-on-ubuntu-getting-started https://ubuntu.com/blog/matter-on-ubuntu-getting-started

neilv 3y ago
ubuntu.com bad-faith cookie-consent UI. We should start pushing back against that, and maybe stop linking sites that do it.

dcj4 3y ago

> This small application > switch an LED or another device via a relay > requires around 8GB of disk space Bit late for april fools'

anamexis 3y ago
The disk space requirement is to build it yourself from scratch.
- efitz 3y ago
  I went to the matter web site and followed the instructions to install the SDK on a raspberry pi. I didn’t measure how much space it took but it installed dozens (hundreds?) of packages; it is extreme bloatware.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  It takes 13 GB to build yourself the entirety of Chromium, this is has no right to be anywhere close.
- contravariant 3y ago
  That's still insane, you could build an operating system from scratch with that amount of space. All this does is toggle a pin on and off.
squarefoot 3y ago
Especially when a much cheaper ESP32 can do the same thing. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-matter/en/main/esp32/ https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-matter/en/main/esp32...

causality0 3y ago

A pi seems like a crazy amount of muscle just to toggle a couple pins. Not to mention cost. Is this not a job for an ESP32?

sowbug 3y ago
The project is the IoT equivalent of a blink sketch.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  What's the scaled up version that wouldn't also be better suited to an ESP32?

iaw 3y ago

Just as an FYI if you're like me and wanted a Raspberry Pi for something like PiHole but don't want to pay insane prices there are tons of clones out there like the Orange Pi (or just google "Raspberry Pi Alternatives")

smcleod 3y ago
RockPi's are also a great open if you want higher performance.

0x000xca0xfe 3y ago

(Context: Matter is an application layer protocol to control smart home devices, bring them into your Wifi or Thread network, and they ought to work with Homekit/Google Home/Alexa/Smartthings/Home Assistant etc. at the same time) I'm currently working on a Matter device myself and the overengineering is unreal. The idea is great (standardized messages over IP, no internet required, open source SDK on Github) but if they had just used MQTT with some standardized JSON messages and two or three fixed onboarding flows it would have solved the same problems with 1% of the effort. But now the project is absolutely massive, almost 1k pages for the base spec, 1M+ lines of (mostly C++) code for the core SDK, no stable or even well defined API, almost no documentation. Progress is glacial, unsuprisingly. Bug fixes do not seem to be backported to older release branches but there is no source code compatibility either, so the security story will be interesting for sure... Most discussions seem to happen on an internal Discord server and Wiki for paying members only, so the project is not that open either. I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes...

cryo 3y ago
Last time I cloned the repository it was already over 20 GB, holy ***. Having read the spec up and down a few times I think it's sound, my main complain would be the device attestation and blockchain usage for OTA. Also Matter inherited the very same thing that sucked most for Zigbee: manufacturer specific "enhancements" are valid, what could possibly go wrong.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes... Do we need a new thing? ZigBee and mqtt already exist. Maybe something a little nicer over IP networks?
- westurner 3y ago
  "Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186286 From https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#architecture-overview https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#architecture... : > Matter aims to build a universal IPv6-based communication protocol for smart home devices. The protocol defines the application layer that will be deployed on devices and the different link layers to help maintain interoperability. The following diagram illustrates the normal operational mode of the stack: > [...] It is built with market-proven technologies using Internet Protocol (IP) and is compatible with Thread and Wi-Fi network transports. > Matter was developed by a Working Group within the Connectivity Standards Alliance (Alliance). This Working Group develops and promotes the adoption of the Matter standard, a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. The vision that led major industry players to come together to build Matter is that smart connectivity should be simple, reliable, and interoperable. > [...] The code examples show simple interactions, and are supported on multiple transports -- Wi-Fi and Thread -- starting with resource-constrained (i.e., memory, processing) silicon platforms to help ensure Matter’s scalability. Would it make sense to have an mqtt transport for matter? Or a bridge; like homeassistant or similar? https://github.com/home-assistant/core#featured-integrations https://github.com/home-assistant/core#featured-integrations lists mqtt Is there already a good (security) comparison of e.g. http basic auth, x10, ZigBee, mqtt, matter?

FpUser 3y ago

With the current prices Pi makes no sense

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

I was disappointed when I saw that Matter chose to go with Thread. It's pretty terrible, even for home usage. I managed a solution that was initially based on Thread but moved it over to a proprietary 802.15.4 protocol. - Entire network runs on a single radio channel... not very resistant to interference. Good luck in congested environments. Other protocols channel hop. - Only had 15ish channels you can operate on as opposed to other protocols that have up to 40. - If you have a lot of devices on the network, it can take hours for the mesh to form / re-form. - Horrible for battery powered devices. You get contention with a lot of and or chatty devices. There's no scheduling for transmitting so you have to "listen" with your receiver on until you "hear" nothing, then you transmit. Switching to a protocol that uses time slotting more than doubled our device's battery life.

solarkraft 3y ago
Damn, I had hope for Thread. I was hoping for something that works as well as Zigbee, but I can actually use. The documentation of OpenThread is amazing, so I was excited. > a proprietary 802.15.4 protocol A licensed existing solution or something custom? > Switching to a protocol that uses time slotting more than doubled our device's battery life. Do you think this applies to most use cases?
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
  >A licensed existing solution or something custom? We went with something licensed. >Do you think this applies to most use cases? I should have included "time slotting AND channel hopping." Given how congested the 2.4GHz band is, I think it does apply to a lot of battery powered use cases (especially wearables). Some use cases see a far greater benefit than others. The deployment environment also plays a big part. If you have a lot of traffic on a channel, the radio hops to another channel so there's reduced error rates (reduced transmission reattempts = saved energy). If you have a quiet radio environment and a lot of devices that communicate infrequently or a very small number of devices on the mesh, you may not see a huge benefit. One downside of a time slot channel hopping protocol is that you need a more expensive crystal in your hardware for accurate time keeping/scheduling. Upside is that you have a reduced total cost of ownership as you need to buy fewer replaceable batteries.