News
Happy New Year!
Thank you for your trust in the P44 products, your feedback, your ideas for new features and sometimes your patience in solving problems! 2023 will be an exciting year for the SmartHome, I hope you will continue to be part of it!
Many things will be exciting in 2023 - certainly including seeing where the text and image AIs that became widely available at the end of 2022 will take us. The image for this text, for example, was created by Midjourney with the prompt "The future and power of open source standards, abstract, geometric, calm, clean smart tech look, many joyful colours ".
For the SmartHome, 2023 will be exciting to see the adoption of matter. Although this new standard was already published in October 2022 and many manufacturers have shown or announced devices, there is still very little on the market.
So there were probably hardly any matter gadgets under the tree, even for smart home fans...
But if you have a P44-DSB or P44-LC, you can already try it out now as a beta. Or if you like to do some tinkering over the holidays, likewise - the do-it-yourself LED torch from last year or other LED setups become a matter bridge with the new beta SD card image for P44-DSB-X or P44-LC-X standalone controller. With this, you can already say "Hey Siri, switch on the torch", and much more, see Youtube-Video...
Soon in 2023, however, things should really get going with matter, when many of the announced products and updates actually become available.
For the installation industry, matter opens up above all a new long-term opportunity: Smarthome-capable infrastructure!
Because matter is to the smarthome what the power socket was to electrification 100 years ago - a standard so that the building-side infrastructure can be connected to (and disconnected from) the customer-side devices in a simple way.
If matter-enabled devices (such as P44-LC-DE) are installed in a fixed installation, the future users can determine the mobile part of the smarthome themselves and bring it along with them. Whether they prefer to use Alexa or Siri, have chosen iPhones or Android, Apple or Samsung, or even use a combination of everything - it no longer makes any difference.
What also makes matter special: the software is open source. Not only big companies, but also small ones like plan44 can join in (there are still problems in the area of certification, which will hopefully get more attention in 2023).
In this sense - a happy new year - in which we will hopefully see a lot of the illustrative "future and power of open source standards", not only in the SmartHome!
