In addition to Apple, Google, Amazon, and Zigbee, the site says that “Zigbee Alliance board-member companies IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also on board to join the Working Group and contribute to the project.”
The list of participating companies.
Credit: Connected Home IP
The list of participating companies. Credit: Connected Home IP
It’s impossible to know how truly committed each company is to Project CHIP at this stage, but the promised goal of building devices that are “compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others” sounds great. Compatibility with the major voice-command systems is a primary concern for any new smart home product, and being able to tackle the big three with a single standard sounds a lot easier than implementing three separate APIs.
Project CHIP is open source. The site says “The reference implementation of the new standard, and its supporting tooling, will be developed and maintained on the GitHub open source platform for all aspects of the specification. Please stay tuned for more information.” The website also says the new standard will be “royalty-free,” which is not currently the case for Zigbee or Apple’s HomeKit.
IP-based
As the name suggests, the new standard will be IP-based, and it “aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.” The site says the project aims to build “a new, unified connectivity protocol” that will “use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others.”
It sounds like, for starters, there will be three main network standards supported by the new project. “The goal of the first specification release will be Wi-Fi, up to and including 802.11ax (aka Wi-Fi 6)… Thread over 802.15.4-2006 at 2.4 GHz; and IP implementations for Bluetooth Low Energy, versions 4.1, 4.2, and 5.0 for the network and physical wireless protocols.”