Hey guys – just popping in here to address some of the questions. I was MIA last week working on something for Apple (the feedback from this thread was referenced a ton). Hoping they’ll listen, but we’ll see!
Great idea – I’m going to work on the messaging this afternoon!
It’s one of those, “it should be able to handle it, but we’ve been getting mixed messaging about it, so let’s just be safe and not promise anything anymore”.
We’ve been able to update (via a wire harness) a Fan switch from Zigbee to Matter as both the Blue and White Series Fan Switch uses the MG24, so in theory it should work on the mmWave version, but until we’ve successfully done it, I don’t want to promise anything.
Good to know 
I think I’ve dug myself into a hole with this by saying we can just swap orders to Matter if you want it, so another Kickstarter wouldn’t be necessary. We can just eat the cost at this point to make things right. I just want to make people aware that Matter still has a way to go and if not Matter, then the hubs that support it do and while the switches have all these cool features that minimize user frustration (zones, interference areas, etc), those will not be possible on most Matter hubs.
I’m with you on putting a disclaimer on the site that says it’s not possible with Apple, Amazon, etc, but the amount of people who still order and then blast the poor user experience may be enough to convince others the product isn’t ready for prime-time, which is my concern.
Now, the mmWave sensor does have a built in, “learning-mode” which I think can be utilized and will work for Matter users on Apple, but I’d like to make sure it actually works as well. How this works is that you turn on your fan, or whatever other object you think will interfere with the sensor’s readings and then leave the room and the sensor automatically finds those interference devices and excludes it from its readings. In other words, it will set the interference areas for you.
Great question – without giving too much information (as I’m just honestly not sure what I can and cannot say and am erring on the side of caution), this person’s job is to help with integration with Matter devices (he also does Zigbee and Z-Wave) and works directly with the major hubs to at least make them aware of the issues. His words were, “Apple is a tough one to get in the door with unless they see a product that is new and exciting and benefits them – if they find those things, they will then be all over you to work with them”.
I was skeptical of the conversation going in, but given who he works for and who recommended him, I was actually impressed with the meeting and have faith that our concerns will at least reach Apple. Now, if they find our stuff new and exciting, I think they will, but I’m also biased lol.
Yeah, I agree. There’s definitely promise with Matter, and I firmly believe it will succeed. We’re just stuck in this interim area right now where we want to put out technologically advanced products, but with that leads to poor user experience until the hub manufacturers can catch up with their UI’s.
I do think the mmWave switch will be what persuades them as I had a conversation with my personal favorite IoT company and they could barely keep still when I told them we were working on an mmWave version of our switch. I made sure to reference this in the Apple presentation to see if it would budge them at all 
You’re welcome, happy to help!
Haha, yeah… well the good news is it seems the sensor is in metric, so it will be us American’s that will have to use the conversion tables!
Great question – I think @bobzer knows more about it than me (I am honestly not sure) but maybe @EricM_Inovelli can help with this one.
Aside from any technical concerns, there’s also a capital concern. I’m not sure we have the resources (both time and money) to create an app right now. On the other hand, maybe we can’t afford not to. Something to consider.
Haha, ok, and I’ll add at the end, “our community members will also call you out for ignoring this disclaimer”.
I agree with you in terms of your Thread comments and mixing them up with Matter. Again, what I think the challenging thing for us is exactly what you hit on in your summary… it’s the people who see Matter and just buy it, only to realize that a lot of the advanced features shown cannot be done from within the UI of Apple, Amazon, Google, etc and that leads to frustration. And I know there’s people who use Home Assistant, SmartThings, and Hubitat where a lot of these settings can be accessed, but as this is primarily targeted at mass market, most mass market customers don’t really care about Thread vs WiFi – they see the word Matter and assume it works great with their Apple, Google, or Amazon device.
In all fairness, I understand their grievances as I remember the days when I first started and just bought devices based on the fact that it said it worked with my hub. With no programming background, I didn’t want to mess with anything crazy, just wanted a device that did the basics (which ours does too, but I think they get roped in by the flashy features).
What I’m trying to say is that it boils down to the marketing message which is my problem and I just need to sit down and figure out how to market to both the mass market which drives the sales for the White Series as well as educate them that the devices are limited on the mass market platforms.
Maybe I’m carrying some pessimism from when we first touted Z-Wave and I felt like there was zero support for newer customers who had no clue what Z-Wave does and therefore didn’t want to buy our products because they were much more expensive than the WiFi equivalent, but what I struggle with is that I don’t think the average customer cares about Thread (or any of the other protocols for that matter – pun intended). Rather, they just want to see a product that’s compatible with their hub.
Without boring you to death with marketing, but here’s the uphill battle:
- We’re never going to win on pricing – it’s impossible to compete with Chinese manufacturers that can sell a cheap matter light switch for $10, so our strategy has always been to win with firmware, win with customer support and win with you guys who help us develop amazing switches
- That said, if a mass market customer sees a light switch that is $10 or one that is $50, they typically want to understand why there’s such a price difference. That’s where the flashy videos, cool features, etc are shown to say, “we’re more expensive, but you get a ton more features”
- The problem then becomes, “well, in order to use these features, you have to either set them up manually at the switch, or use some weird workaround in the UI to get them to work” and then they become more of a headache than it’s worth
I can list out the features of Thread until I’m blue in the face, but at the end of the day, based on what I’ve seen with Z-Wave (which I know is slightly apples to oranges as Thread has the support of the major mass market hubs whereas Z-Wave does not aside from SmartThings) no one is paying a huge difference in price for a protocol when, in their mind, WiFi works just fine (sure, they can learn the hard way, as I did, that WiFi products come with their own issues, but who knows if they’re willing to take that chance).
Long winded way of saying, I know Thread makes sense to the power users of the world who care about which protocol their devices run on, but I promise you that the average person does not seem to care. This was a hard pill for me to swallow, but I had to think back to the days I first started and had no clue about Z-Wave, Zigbee, WiFi, etc. I just wanted a Wink compatible product.
Great question – we should know more when we start beta testing it with the larger team, but I can speak at a high level on my and the other Eric’s experience thus far.
For the first question, 100% of the time, the sensor still tracks the first person. I’ve never had it not detect me when I was sitting there and someone came and went and I’ve tried this at least 50 times.
For the second question, some use-cases for multiple people tracking would be:
- To understand if your teen has her boyfriend over when you’re not expecting him to be… no further comment lol
- To understand how many people are at your house or in a specific room at a given time (let’s say you want to make sure all your kids got home from school) – I know there are other ways to solve for this, but this would be another data point
- If you want to get crazy, you could have separate automations based on where someone is in the room (ie: bed lamp on the left side is off if it’s just you and you’re on the right side of the bed, then turns on if your significant other joins).
- An interesting use-case that was brought up was to use these if you’re monitoring your elderly parents – like why hasn’t dad moved in 20 hours and where is mom type deal
Yeah this is an excellent point – this hit me last week when I was thinking about this more. Glad I wasn’t crazy!
Yeah this is an interesting idea – let me see how much cost this would add. I think @adam5532’s point about how other, non-smart switches typically aren’t spaced properly makes me feel much better about it too.
Another good possibility. I’m not sure a needle-nose would be able to grip it though as it’s kind of small, but let me look into this as that’s a good idea.
I wish I had that pull lol.
Hmmm… let me look into this. We’ve had some weird issues with our site the past week. I planned on looking at all of them today now that I have some spare time.
Yeah absolutely – shoot me a PM if no one has worked with you yet. I’m not sure why no one has responded, but I’ll make sure someone helps you today if you haven’t already been taken care of.
