Project CHIP could arrive this year to unify your smart home devices

The new Nest Hub (Gen 2) already supports the technology behind the new smart home protocol.

What you need to know

• Zigbee Alliance has announced that CHIP products should be ready later this year.
• Project Connected Home over Internet Protocol seeks to unify IoT devices to make them easier to buy and use.
• Some new products like the Nest Hub (Gen 2) will work with the new protocol.

Google, Amazon, Apple, and more than 170 companies have teamed up to make buying smart home appliances less of a hassle, thanks to Project Connected Home over Internet Protocol, or CHIP. The new protocol was announced in 2019 as part of a group managed by Zigbee Alliance and has been in the works for some time. It looks like the wait for the first products may be ending soon, with the first devices expected this year.

In a webinar on Friday, Zigbee Alliance announced that device makers have already begun testing their devices and that the first CHIP-certified products should receive certification before the end of the year. Hopefully, this means new CHIP-certified devices will be launched later this year.

Why does this matter? Our Nick Sutrich explains the benefits that Project CHIP can have on creating a smart smart home. In a nutshell, the purpose of CHIP is to help unify smart home IoT products with a single protocol, moving away from the disparate protocols that cause fragmentation with many smart home devices. This means that you, as a consumer, won’t have to worry about buying whether or not the best smart home products you buy will work with your existing ecosystem. This can also help retailers create a simplified buying experience for selling products like smart lights, door locks, security systems, and more.

Some devices already support the Thread mesh technology behind CHIP, such as the recently launched Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen), and according to The Verge, existing products may eventually be bridged to work with the new protocol as well. Thanks to CHIP, 2022 could be the year of the smarter smart home.