The Aqara M3 - how useful is it? Pretty Useful. Probably not in the way expected.
I seem to have buying a few Aqara devices recently. They are certainly prolific, and they seem to tick many boxes. However, Aqara early adopters have to put up with what I'd call beta firmware, even though it is official. It seems to take them a while to get the product sorted, whilst we all run as beta sites for them. So, I hung off on the M3 for a while. Sure, it looked good on paper. All of those protocols, and a Matter controller and bridge to boot. What was not to like? Well: Initially, as usual, the firmware wasn't up to its full potential. e.g., the Matter support was very limited. That has gone away, to an extent, but it seems it supports Matter V1.1, and V1.3 is the current release at time of writing, and it won't be too long until V1.4 is out. Zigbee is actually just Aqara Zigbee devices. Still, there's a lot to like. I've replaced my E1 and the migration was seamless. It runs on PoE (Power over Ethernet) if you want it to. It is a Matter and HomeKit br
