I've had Philips Hue lights for more than a decade. And for some years now a Tado smart heating solution. Both of these have their own hub/bridge to let the lights and stuff and the main thermometer plus the radiator valves talk to the rest of the network. So that takes power, space, and, perhaps most importantly, relatively scarce wired Ethernet ports.
Originally I think the idea of these bridges was to literally bridge between your home network and the ZigBee or 6LowPan or whatever IoT network. But we don't need that anymore because the new Thread protocol can handle that part.
Now it does make sense that makers of more complex home automation stuff would want to have a little box running more complex software than having to rely on the tiny computers inside lightbulbs and the like. And Steve Jobs may have said that people who care about software should make their own hardware (I think he got that backwards), but really? Couldn't the Hue bridge software run in a container on a Matter/Thread border router with Raspberry Pi-like computing resources? (It's ridiculous how well Docker runs on my Pi 4.)
With thus a lower threshold for being able to run more complex software, home automation / IoT could get a lot more interesting!
Originally I think the idea of these bridges was to literally bridge between your home network and the ZigBee or 6LowPan or whatever IoT network. But we don't need that anymore because the new Thread protocol can handle that part.
Now it does make sense that makers of more complex home automation stuff would want to have a little box running more complex software than having to rely on the tiny computers inside lightbulbs and the like. And Steve Jobs may have said that people who care about software should make their own hardware (I think he got that backwards), but really? Couldn't the Hue bridge software run in a container on a Matter/Thread border router with Raspberry Pi-like computing resources? (It's ridiculous how well Docker runs on my Pi 4.)
With thus a lower threshold for being able to run more complex software, home automation / IoT could get a lot more interesting!
