2024 review — Bespoke kitchen, Frame TV, Matter bridges
Fourteen months into the new house now. Long enough that the automations have stopped being a project and started being plumbing — the test I actually care about. A thing is done when nobody in the family mentions it anymore, because it just works. By that measure, 2024 was the year the kitchen finally went quiet.
Scoring last year's forecast
I grade these honestly every year — the point is to catch myself being optimistic, not to look good. These are the eight calls I made for 2024 in last December's review.
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung Bespoke kitchen complete | 95% | Yes — March | ✓ |
| EV charger | 85% | Tesla Wall Connector 48A installed June | ✓ |
| Matter devices proliferate | 80% | 18 devices + 3 bridges live | ✓ |
| Frame TV ecosystem post | 95% | June post shipped | ✓ |
| Third wall-mounted dashboard | 80% | Office one finally up (July) | ✓ |
| AI sensor classification in Frigate | 60% | DoubleTake + CompreFace tested, mediocre — not deployed | ✗ |
| Tesla Powerwall reconsidered | 40% | Considered, again decided against — generator stays | ✓ (no, as predicted) |
| Second LoRa gateway | 65% | Yes, added at the garden edge | ✓ |
6/8 = 76%. Within the band I usually land in. And the two misses are the same miss: both were bets that the AI-on-camera layer would mature enough to deploy. It didn't. That's worth flagging as a pattern, not a one-off — the hardware in this house lands on schedule; the intelligence layer keeps slipping a year.
What got added in 2024
- Samsung Bespoke oven, dishwasher, washer, and dryer. The kitchen and laundry are now fully connected. Whether that matters is a separate question I keep poking at.
- EV charger — Tesla Wall Connector 48A, in since June.
- Three Matter bridges, live: the Aqara M2, the Hue Bridge, and the Home Assistant add-on bridging everything else. (How each one works.)
- 18 Matter devices — Eve sensors, Nanoleaf bulbs, Eve Energy plugs.
- Second LoRa gateway at the garden edge, which fixed the dead spot at the back fence I'd been living with.
- HA's local voice assistant, experimental — Whisper for speech-to-text, Piper for the voice, both running on the box. Early days. More below.
What held up at year-end
- Matter bridges plus multi-ecosystem visibility. Apple Home, Google Home, HA, and SmartThings all see the same devices now, each through its own commissioning. After years of "which app controls this bulb again," that's the quiet win of the year.
- Frigate 0.13's re-identification. A person walks porch → driveway → side yard and gets tracked as one event instead of three. The difference between a useful notification and a stream of noise.
- EV charging automation — charges 11 PM to 6 AM on the off-peak rate unless I've told it I'm leaving early. SmartThings reads the Tesla state through the unofficial integration; not robust, but it's held.
- The mailbox sensor. Running since spring once I repositioned the antenna and got the LoRa range back. Small thing, disproportionate satisfaction.
What didn't
- Local HA voice for daily use. The all-local stack (Whisper + Piper) carries about three seconds of ASR latency, and the Piper voices are robotic enough that the family won't use it. The idea — voice that never leaves the house — is exactly right. The execution isn't there yet.
- Frigate face recognition. Tried DoubleTake and CompreFace. The false-positive rate was high enough that the feature was worse than not having it. Pulled both.
The shape of the year, in one picture — and the same shape that's held for a while now:
Forecast for 2025
The standing rule on these: I keep the forecasts even when I get them wrong, because the misses are the most useful part to reread later.
1. A SmartThings local-execution post. (95%) Samsung's been pushing custom drivers down onto the hub itself for a couple of years now — rough at first, but it's worth a real write-up on whether the cloud-dependency complaint that drove me off SmartThings in 2017 still holds.
2. Robots — Roomba + Braava routines. (90%) The iRobot pair has been part of the family for years and the routine integration has never gotten its own post. Overdue.
3. Frame TV + kitchen appliance sync, improved. (85%) The Bespoke ecosystem is genuinely starting to couple — appliances talking to screens. Worth documenting what actually earns its keep versus what's a demo.
4. The long-arc retrospective. (100%) Thirteen years of these posts. Sometime around November, a look back across the whole arc.
5. Matter camera support in some products. (70%) Matter 1.4 was ratified in November; camera support is the obvious next thing the spec needs. Whether it ships in consumer products in 2025 is the open question.
6. HA voice gets usable. (50%) Faster Whisper models, better Piper voices, and HA's Wyoming protocol maturing could close the gap. Coin flip.
7. Solar + Tesla Powerwall, reconsidered yet again. (30%) Probably still no. The generator keeps winning the math.
8. End-of-2025 review. (100%) The pattern continues.
The eight ranked by confidence — and you can see last year's lesson sitting at the bottom:
What I'm buying in 2025
- A couple of Matter cameras, if and when they ship.
- A pair of Aqara HomeKit Secure Video upgrades for the doorbell.
- More ESP32-based DIY devices as needs come up.
- An HA Green or another HA Yellow as a cold spare — the one piece of infrastructure I don't want to be without.
The honest summary of 2024: the house got more connected and, for the first time, slightly calmer for it. The bridge layer is why. Next year's question is whether the intelligence layer — voice, vision — finally catches up to the plumbing.