That’s a great new hub; I wish it was priced more competitively and had the US Z-Wave frequencies. Yet Aeotec doesn’t seem too eager to update the 500-series ST V3 hubs.
I believe Espressif’s blog post shares that Z-Wave devices see the Z-Wave/Matter Bridge only as a Z-Wave Hub (primary or secondary?). That is, the hard work seems to be on the bridge to convert MatterIP-to-Z-Wave and Z-Wave-to-MatterIP.
And then the bridge device “exposes” the Z-Wave devices to the Matter Fabric, which can then be controlled by Matter Controllers.
Meanwhile, people may have a question: There are many IoT products in the consumers’ home already, these can be the devices based on Zigbee, Z-Wave, BLE Mesh and others. Could these non-Matter devices work together with Matter ecosystem? The answer is YES.
Thus, hopefully, we may not need Z-Wave over IP on the device-side. But, we’ll see: if SmartThings (and / or Aeotec) decides it isn’t interested in Z-Wave bridging, I do hope manufactures like ThinkA or others will come forward with full-featured hubs (Matter hubs + multiple bridges).
At this point, I’d much rather replace a SmartThings hub than replace all the switches, lights, accessories, etc.
// in other news
Google Developers has also launched a short set of videos for Android app Matter Controllers this week. This video seems like multi-admin is likely confirmed for the standard (e.g., multiple apps / controllers attached to a single device).
Noting how different some UIs are, I hope they’ll allow proper syncing, so we don’t need to repeatedly & manually propagate each device across, say, three controllers (Alexa, HomeKit, Google Home, etc.).
