I am going to start with setting up my first smart home setup. I am gonna start out really simple with one led strip and one lightbulb, but I want to have the option to upgrade. Another must is ability to connect to my apple homekit.
I now have 2 options but I am not sure which to go for.
The first option is the Ikea dirigera, in combination with a led strip and bulb from Ikea. I know it works with homekit. They did say that they will update it to support matter, but a year later they did not give more information.
The second option is using a philips hue bridge with matter support and lights from Nanoleaf or ikea, but I am not sure if those lightscan connect to the hue bridge. As I understand the nanoleaf matter supported lights should be able to connect to the hue bridge right?
What do you guys advise?
edit: a third option could be the nanoleaf lights with matter in combination with the homepod mini. This is more expensive tho and I dont know if I will use it as speaker that much.
I would go with option one to start out. If the lights connect to HomeKit, then you probably don’t need Matter at the moment. And starting out, working within one vendor simplifies things for beginners. The nice thing about the IKEA stuff is that the devices use the zigbee wireless protocol to talk to the hub. So if you ever decide to go with a more capable automation software (Home Assistant, Hubitat, etc) the bulb and light strip can connect directly via an open zigbee dongle.
The problem with option two:
The Philips Hue bridge pretty much only controls Phillips hue devices (with a few exceptions). It does not control Nanoleaf devices which are WiFi based (if they are the Thread based ones, then you would need a Thread border router like the HomePods. Hue bridge doesn’t have Thread) It looks like the IKEA devices can be controlled by the Hue bridge but at that point, why not just go with the cheaper and probably more reliable option of using the same vendor’s bridge?