After about four months of switching to a smarthome system—Home Assistant—run from a tiny computer in my basement instead of from a tech giant on the cloud, I still feel only vaguely familiar with the different wireless protocols available.
(The majority of people who ask for help on Reddit are ridiculed by self-important tools just for trying to learn something for which the documentation is so scant and/or overly technical. I haven’t even tried to interact with that cesspool after how I’ve observed the way they treat newcomers to the hobby.)
Once Home Assistant is set up, a user can install ‘integrations’ to find different kinds of devices. A lot of products that the average consumer may already be using (with Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home) can be detected with the Tuya integration, but in my experience these have required another, cloud-based app first. My goal in switching to HA was to not use anything which required looping through the cloud.
Some devices can be managed entirely locally with regular Wifi or Bluetooth. I was surprised to find my fifteen year old Wifi printer was readable by HA.
Turns out I’m completely empty on yellow toner.
But then there are other wireless protocols, such as Z-wave, Zigbee, and Matter. I have not dabbled in Z-wave, so I can’t comment on its quality. For Zigbee, I bought an inexpensive USB dongle to plug into the HA computer. From there, connecting Zigbee devices (mostly just light bulbs at the moment) was extremely simple: plug it in, turn it on, HA sees it. I have not had any problems with these devices so far.
The one I don’t quite understand yet is Matter. From what I think I know, Matter is a communication method, which uses a wireless medium called Thread. (Matter is to a particular vehicle what Thread is to the road you drive different vehicles on.) I was gifted a few smart plugs which use Matter, so I need to test them out.