2022 review — Matter shipped, the LoRa garden worked
Every December I score last year's forecast honestly — the misses included — and then bet on the next twelve months. This year the scorecard is solid, but the headline isn't on it. The headline is that we bought a lot, and 2023 is the year I stop retrofitting and get to wire a house from the studs out.
First, the receipts.
Scoring the 2022 forecast
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matter 1.0 ships, products by Q4 | 75% | CSA ratified Oct 4; the big four committed Nov 3. Products thin so far | ✓ |
| Frigate 0.12 + proper face recognition | 65% | 0.11 shipped (Sept); face-rec still isn't native — only bolt-on via DoubleTake. 0.12 slipped to 2023 | ✗ (partial) |
| New-house build planning starts | 90% | Plans drawn, lot purchased in October, framing Q2 2023 | ✓ |
| ESPHome keeps exploding | 95% | 22 ESP devices now, up from 14 | ✓ |
| Aqara Matter-bridge for Zigbee | 70% | M2 hub shipped; Matter-via-firmware arriving Q4 | ✓ |
| Home Assistant Yellow ships | 80% | Shipped; it's the primary HA host now | ✓ |
| A DIY weather station | 60% | Half-built. The wind/rain sensors are still in a box | ✗ (partial) |
| Tesla Powerwall in the plan | 50% | Talked myself out of it — going natural-gas standby instead | ✗ |
5.5 of 8 = 70%. The two partials are both timing, not bad calls: Frigate's face recognition is real, it just isn't native yet, and the weather station is a weekend I never spent. The clean miss is the Powerwall — I forecast it at a coin-flip and then the math on solar-plus-storage for our climate didn't close, so the new build gets a natural-gas standby generator instead. Honest is honest.
The Frigate line deserves a footnote, because it's the kind of thing I'd want a teammate to flag rather than fudge: I scored myself a "0.12 with face recognition." What actually landed in 2022 was 0.11, in September, which added sub-labels — the hook that lets an external recognizer like DoubleTake (running CompreFace under it) write a name back onto an event. That's face recognition you wire up yourself, not face recognition in the box, and the 0.12 release that's supposed to clean it up is now a 2023 problem. So: partial, not a hit. I bought a second Coral in December anyway, betting on 0.12 landing early next year.
What got added this year
- LoRa garden irrigation — the project I'm proudest of. Eight RAK soil sensors and three B-Hyve valves, talking LoRa to a gateway, watering off real soil-moisture data instead of a dumb timer. Ran a full season unattended and skipped watering through the wet weeks on its own.
- 22 ESPHome devices total, eight added this year: outdoor temp/humidity, plant moisture, a garage-door reed switch, and a mailbox-open detector.
- Aqara M2 hub (December) as the Thread Border Router — and a Zigbee bridge for my existing Aqara sensors, so it earns its slot twice.
- Home Assistant Yellow running HA OS, which replaced the Pi 4 as the primary host.
- A second Coral USB (December) for the Frigate box.
The big news: we're building
We bought a lot in October. Construction starts Q2 2023. A custom build is the first time I get to design a connected home from the wires up instead of fishing Cat6 through finished walls and apologizing to drywall. Every stud is, briefly, an opportunity — and every opportunity I miss before the drywall closes is a $400 retrofit later. So most of my 2023 is going to be a wire spec.
Forecast for 2023
- New-house construction, Q2–Q4. (95%) The lot's ours; the plans are approved.
- A structured-wiring and PoE backbone, designed before framing. (100%) Every room gets at least two Cat6 drops; the garage and outdoor zones get PoE conduit. This is the buildable-once decision and I will not get it wrong.
- A Samsung Bespoke kitchen suite. (90%) Fridge, oven, dishwasher, washer/dryer in matching panels — the Family Hub fridge carries the touchscreen.
- First Matter devices on the network. (85%) A few Eve sensors, a Nanoleaf bulb, maybe a thermostat — once the firmware wave settles.
- A Frame TV in the great room. (80%) Art display that doubles as a SmartThings hub.
- HA migrates to the new house, Q4. (95%) Physically move the Yellow plus the Z-Wave stick and the Sonoff dongle; re-install most sensors.
- A wall-mounted dashboard on every floor. (80%) Three iPad-mini dashboards, minimum.
- The current house's gear migrates with us. (100%) The devices come; the wiring obviously doesn't.
What I'm buying in 2023
A 1,000-foot box of Cat6. Eight PoE cameras for the new place (five now, three new zones). The Samsung Bespoke suite. A 65-inch Frame TV. Ten or so in-wall keystones. And a 24-port managed PoE switch — a UniFi 24-PoE-Pro, most likely, in the structured-wiring closet.
What's next
The very next post is the one I've wanted to write for a decade: the full connected-home wire spec for the build, drop by drop, before a single stud goes up. After ten years of retrofits, this is the buildable-once chance to get it right.