DEV Community: Madhuresh Gupta

The Next-Gen smart home standard - Matter

Madhuresh Gupta — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 01:13:28 +0000

The convenience of choosing your smart home app and all devices working nicely is finally here..

You might have surely faced this issue with smart home devices that they are not easy to setup, sometimes lack cross platform compatibility or just have to keep a dozen of apps for every product you buy which doesn't seem to be the ideal experience what manufacturers what you to go through.
These days, we can take an ordinary inanimate object, such as a light bulb, and give it new high-tech capabilities by equipping it with a computer chip. As Smart home devices become increasingly popular, manufacturers are working to improve compatibility and set up. The lack of an industry standard made smart home set up more complex than it needed to be since different companies used various standards.

What is Matter?

Matter, is the next-generation smart home standard which is open source and aimed to solve this pain points whilst bringing connecting, setting up and managing IoT devices a more seamless and intuitive process for all it's customers.

Matter is a new smart home standard conceived by Project Connected Home Over IP (Project Chip) in 2019. It's now maintained by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance. The standard is royalty-free and encourages interoperability between devices and platforms.

The CSA brought many of the biggest smart home players on board with Matter, including Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. Getting every company on the same page to support Matter is no small feat. However, it's a significant step toward a better smart home experience.

Device manufacturers need to comply with the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and others. For folks building a smart home, Matter theoretically lets you buy any device and use the voice assistant or platform you prefer to control it (yes, you should be able to use different voice assistants to talk to the same product).

For example, you'll be able to buy a Matter-supported smart bulb and set it up with Apple Homekit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa-without having to worry about compatibility. Right now, some devices already support multiple platforms (like Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand that platform support and make setting up your new devices faster and easier.

Matter is the solution to those pain points of cross-compatibility issues and having a uniform setup experience

What will Matter work with at the moment?

Many devices have been launched with the hardware required and companies were waiting on the Matter 1.0 launch so that they can enable the feature via a OTA firmware update. Amazon has announced that 17 Alexa devices will start getting matter support starting with Alexa Echo dot gen 4 in the first quater of 2023.

The first specification, or Matter 1.0, covers only certain categories of devices, including:

Light bulbs and switches
Smart plugs
Smart locks
Safety and security sensors
Media devices including TVs
Smart blinds and shades
Garage door controllers
Thermostats
HVAC controllers

Further versions will also have support for doorbells, robot vaccums, security cameras.

Thread, a cherry on top of Matter standards

Thread is a low-power mesh network protocol that will soon become the backbone of smart connected home

Thread is a wireless protocol specifically built for IoT devices. It's designed to make them work faster, have fewer points of failure, use less power, and communicate with each other more seamlessly.

A low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking protocol that uses the 802.15.4 radio technology, Thread is similar to existing smart home protocols Zigbee and Z-Wave. But unlike them, it doesn't need a central hub or bridge. Instead, Thread devices can talk directly to each other. By cutting out the middle man, Thread can be faster, especially over large networks.

Also, unlike the other low-powered smart home protocols, Thread is internet protocol (IP)-based, meaning it can directly connect to any other IP-based device, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. "What makes it unique is that it was built on IP," says Neidig. "We are bringing the same protocol that the internet runs on to run on small devices."

Security and Privacy

The Matter standards and API are open source and freely available on GitHub. The Matter smart home standard also addresses another common pain point with current IoT devices: requiring a constant internet connection. IoT devices have previously relied exclusively on the cloud for everything, making them useless when you lose connection to the internet.

Matter allows your devices to work offline without requiring continuous access to the cloud. Less reliance on the cloud also means increased security for your devices, making Matter even more beneficial. The goal is to combine these new features to give you the best smart home experience possible.

Next time now you are buying any new smart home device, do look out for Matter support which will make it future proof. Matter over Thread will be an added advantage feature which would help other Matter enabled devices in your home to communicate without directly connecting to the wifi router.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the next generation of IoT devices running under the Matter-certified brand looks to bring the future smart homes to the present day.

Have you tried Github profile readme?

Madhuresh Gupta — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 14:46:02 +0000

A new feature has come up in Github where you can add a README file for your profile! Yes finally we can have a short description about yourself on the profile page in GitHub.

It is really simple to get started with having your own GitHub profile Readme.

First just head over to create new repository and give the repo name same as your GitHub username (in my case it's madhuresh97) and you will see a green message box like the photo below:

Make sure you have checked "Initialize this repo with a README" as this is the place where you will be writing about yourself which will be displayed in your GitHub profile.

Now commit your content what you would like any person visiting your GitHub profile to know about you.

Finally git commit your changes.

That's it!! 🚀

This is what my GitHub profile README looks like:

GitHub Codespaces - The future of coding, all without leaving GitHub

Madhuresh Gupta — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 08:17:01 +0000

Microsoft sponsored - GitHub today had it's annual event: GitHub satellite where they announced how they are making GitHub more accessible and secure than before. But one new announcement which took everyone by storm was the announcement of GitHub codespaces.

As you can see clearly from the above picture, it's the same VSCode which we all use on a daily basis but instead on browser which is containerized in GitHub thus opening a completely new paradigm on how and what resources we use to code today.
Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment.
A codespace includes everything you need to develop for a specific repository, including a text editor with syntax highlighting and autocomplete, a terminal, debugging tools, and Git commands, all within GitHub. You can also install Visual Studio Code extensions in your codespace to add more functionality.
These codespaces allows you to develop in the cloud taking advantage of Microsoft's Azure cloud instead of locally. Developers can contribute from anywhere, on any machine, including tablets or Chromebooks, and there is no need to maintain local copies of intellectual property.

Your codespace will install all extensions and settings directly if you have a "dotfile" repository present in your GitHub account and will automatically detect it. Currently this container will be 2 vCPUs along with 4 GB RAM but in future this configuration will be customizable according to one's need.

What are my views on this?

Well there are many problems we developers face in setting up a dev environment many at times ending up in setup errors which can take hours to fix. But with a containerized VS Code environment which will take dependencies right from my repository and within a minute, I am ready with a dev environment.
This way I can spend more time on actual coding rather than setting up the environment.
I believe that this will be popularly adopted by companies because it will be cheaper and faster for companies to buy VS Code containers rather than spending on expensive powerful laptops for employees. Also another advantage would be that this online version would mean my development now has no boundaries and we can code using any device that has an internet connection and a browser.
Personally, I am pretty much excited to try this. Currently it is available in beta and you can signup from- https://github.com/features/codespaces/signup