I am probably out of date on this, hence this post. I am in the UK.
We have had a Chinese, stand-alone video doorbell for years. It worked well, but lately it has started becoming more of a door decoration than a functioning doorbell, so it is time to change. Most of the smart home stuff in the house is based around Smartthings with all devices being Zigbee, and we have a number of Nest Mini speakers and two Nest Hubs. I thought that Matter and Zigbee didn’t support video devices, but I just saw this: Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select , which seems to suggest that it can operate using Matter and Zigbee.
So, should I be sceptical or should this simply work? It also seems to have an integrated hub for Aqara devices, but I don’t know if that is any benefit or not.
The camera part is a matter over wifi device, not zigbee. I’ll not transfer video using zigbee.
About the zigbee part, it has an Aqara hub embedded and a zigbee radio, so you can connect zigbee devices to it and share (bridge) the supported devices with other ecosystems, like smartthings, through matter (ETH/wifi)
Thanks for the clarification. People who have read other posts of mine on the subject of Matter will know how annoying I find it that normal users have to dig so deep, if they are aware of the issues at all, to make sure any given device will actually work as it says it will in their own ecosystem. So, if I understand this correctly, this is a Matter device, so it should integrate into my Smartthings ecosystem and also into Google Home. Presumably it isn’t possible to know exactly what functions are exposed in each case to set up automations though. Anything video is going into the system via Wifi, but that shouldn’t be an issue. Sounds like an interesting option then.
Aqara are particularly sneaky with this … proudly announce Matter on the device, and then in the fine print mention that you’ll need an Aqara hub which will act as a Matter Bridge for this totally-not-matter device.
Exactly! Hence my suspicions. The fact that the chime acts as the hub with no extra expense or space requirement makes it more acceptable in this case though and also means I can add Aqara devices in the future. I quite like what they make, and they seem to be decent quality, but I have refused before to add yet another hub to my system.
I kind of got suckered into some Aqara gear. Bought a two 3-packs of their leak sensors thinking I could connect them into SmartThings.
Long story short they kept falling offline when connected to my V2 SmartThings hub. Finally broke down and got an M2 hub. Which meant I was now running a second Zigbee mesh. Which required a couple of mains-powered Aqara devices to get signal where I needed it.
Then, since I was already invested in Aqara devices, I added several of their temp/humidity sensors.
Anyway. The M2 hub is bridged to the SmartThings hub via Matter and everything works. So all’s well that ends.