Maybe my confusion is in the whole thread / matter relationship. Let me reiterare I will be purchasing from the first round of products.
I am just curious from a manufacturerers perspective, and it seems like inovelli is not alone, why come out with a Zigbee product this close to matter becoming a thing when thread is already out there. I have been reminded a number of times that thread and matter are not the same thing and they fit at different levels of the ISO model. Is it because the firmware was already so far along for zigbee? I understand why inovelli started with zigbee, matter wasn’t a thing, and I am sure a lot of work went to it before we first heard of chip. From a consumer point of view it puts a bit of hesitation in the excitement about matter and the mythical smart home.
I know the current voice assistant’s from Apple and Google have a thread radios built in (I would assume but can’t remember at the moment if the current echo devices have thread built in). I also know there are a few manufacturers such as Eve that are currently using thread.
I posted another reply a few minutes ago not seeing this one. I know this has been in the works longer than matter has been a thing. So if I understand correctly it is more about getting the hardware to market so you can see some returns on the (much appreciated) investment s you have made? Also, personally I think I would hate to work on a piece of firmware for so long and have it scrapped at the finish line because the market switched direction.
Oh and I wouldn’t have waisted my time on thread before chip became a thing.
I guess the best way to answer this from our perspective is to go back to late 2019 / early 2020 (ahh the good ol’ days when lead times were 12 weeks, our manufacturer loved us, and we were naive to what was to come from a supply chain standpoint).
We had just started gaining traction from our Gen 2 switches and people were loving the, “Smart Bulb Mode” (known at the time as, “disable internal relay”).
We were also in early talks with Signify (owns Philips Hue) around making an in-wall smart switch for them that would work with their Hue bulbs. They loved our Z-Wave version and wanted us to create a ZigBee version.
Unfortunately that fell through due to the pandemic hitting and they pushed out that project bc they were more interested in the Aurora switch by Lutron bc there was no wiring needed, but we agreed to talk further when they wanted an in-wall switch.
However, we saw the huge potential of creating a ZigBee switch bc there are 1000x more ZigBee bulbs than Z-Wave and we could easily convert our Z-Wave firmware into ZigBee.
Around the same time, CHIP was announced (Connected Home over IP – now Matter) and we saw Philips was a part of that project.
CHIP/Matter aside, we felt ZigBee was still the right play bc while Google and Apple do have thread (I didn’t know about Apple, thanks!) we’d be stretching into an area that seemed a little off-brand and didn’t really have a, “hook” to convince people to buy our switch. If we went Thread, our major selling point, “Smart Bulb Mode” seemed hard to explain to people who are newer to the market and likely hadn’t experienced the pain of having a smart bulb with no smart switch. Whereas the Hue users know this pain all too well – if someone turns off the Hue bulb from a light switch, it doesn’t work.
Hopefully I’m explaining this well – I’m not sure the caffeine has hit yet lol.
The interesting thing is that we actually put ZigBee on hold for 1.5 years lol. We had the idea to come out with it back in late 2019 / early 2020 when we were in talks with Hue – and we even promoted it at CES, but ultimately had to scrap it due to the pandemic and all the issues that came with it (that still are there).
When CHIP was announced, I wanted to bring this back bc I thought it was important to be on the leading edge of something that has the potential to be huge. Imagine if we were one of the first switches that came to market and all these big dogs are now fighting over exclusivity? That’s super exciting for a small company and honestly has kept me up at night for a long time. To top it off, we were told that certain ZigBee chips would be easily converted to Matter (not so much true now, but it can still be done), so it felt like a no-brainer to start with ZigBee to work with Hue and then convert everything over to CHIP/Matter when the time comes.
We finally found a manufacturer that would take us on as our current Z-Wave one had no interest in working on innovation for us (rightly so, but that’s a story for another day) and we kicked off this project with them.
The thought process was this:
Best case scenario – we launch a Matter switch first and the market goes crazy bc all the other major companies put out their usual white-label stuff, whereas ours looks a lot different and we also know and understand our customer (bc we’re customers too)
Worst case scenario – Matter fails to come to fruition and we’re left with a ZigBee switch that still fills the need of Hue users and can still tap into mass market a bit (whereas we now play in a niche, Z-Wave/Power-User market) via Amazon Echo’s that also support ZigBee
So, to hopefully summarize, we’ve always wanted to have a Hue compatible switch bc of the sheer market-size that we can tap into and the problem that we’ve already solved (smart bulb mode) is easily translated from a marketing standpoint to our new target (mass market). We originally wanted to start with 100% CHIP/Matter when the project was announced, but since being delayed, we decided to stick with ZigBee and develop Matter firmware in parallel.
Haha, all good – I saw you typing while I was typing and figured as much
Loving the dialogue btw, thanks for asking your questions!
It’s funny,
I put my dream smart switch search on hold when you announced yours at CES.
My first smart switch was a lutron switch and hated it. I would run into my kids room in the middle of the night and hit the on button instead of the fadu up button right below it. After that a decora style switch became very important. I was looking for a Zigbee switch with a rocker like yours. When I came across your switch I was ready to reluctantly switch to z wave because you had everything but zigbee. After you announced your zigbee switch at ces I started searching for a suitable switch to use in the interim. I ended up with tp link kasa switches because of their price, variety of products and the fact that they have been rock solid compared to others such as wemo.
I really look forward to buying my first switch from you.
On a side note, have you heard of SuperHouseTV? If you are looking at marketing to the maker community I would love to see what the two of you could come up with.
The apple homepod mini has thread, the new nest hubs and nest wifi have it. The new nano leaf devices set up a thread network as well as the eve products. Espressif also has a new esp32 that supports it.
That being said, that’s about it for the mainstream market. Everyone else will be supporting it “in the future”
This is why I asked the question trying to understand what the hesitation towards Thread given how “close” we are to Matter. And I think Eric really answered it with if matter fails they still have a zigbee switch and in today’s market that is more desirable.
Edit: Since this is a prototype, the metal is plain and the plastic is a generic white. The final product will match our current switches (all black). We may possibly make the black blue, but I’ll leave that up to the community on what they think looks best.
I’d be curious on how it will look (the blue background) with a cover plate installed. If it just looks dark (shadow) between the switch and plate, I’d be down for a blue body.
There was a topic a while back discussing the smoothness of the dimming function of Red Series dimmers (Smooth dimming on red series)…has any of that been worked on or considered with this new Blue Series? Can we expect any improvement in the dimming performance?
I vote to make the Blue series Blue
(my preference would be a dark blue and not a baby blue or powder blue)
I currently have a mix of Black and Red series and I often wish the Red ones were actually Red to easily spot which is which after its been installed in the wallbox.
Unfortunately that is not reliable as some people might remove the heat sinks to make more room in the gangbox. I avoid it, but there is one location where I had to do it for one switch.
