TLDR it's so that we can seamlessly synchronize settings and events between them. When to charge from solar, cheap utility rates, or when a storm is incoming.
Consumers (incl me) will not update their 2nd Pila to their new Wifi password when they change it, or not even pare it properly with their first to start with. Also, in an offline situation like a power outage where the internet goes down, you won't be able to communicate over the cloud and synchronize them there. If our servers ever go down (they won't) then you want to be able to rely on local communication.
The local mesh is going to set up new follower devices over an open MQTT api and talk to each other over it - but yes it's more of an enable than a feature in and of itself.
That all makes sense. A few more questions, if you'll humor me:
Why not leverage an existing smart home mesh networking technology? I know the industry has made a hash of the whole Matter/Thread thing, so if the answer is "we didn't like the existing solutions" that's understandable to some extent.
That said, Zigbee seems like an obvious fit here. Adding resilient links to a vendor-agnostic smart home network seems like a selling point to me.
What features will and won't be available in the MQTT interface? Given this product's narrative revolves around resilience in the face of infrastructure failures, I'd hope that the app can use MQTT to provide a complete user experience even when the mothership can't be reached.
Consumers (incl me) will not update their 2nd Pila to their new Wifi password when they change it, or not even pare it properly with their first to start with. Also, in an offline situation like a power outage where the internet goes down, you won't be able to communicate over the cloud and synchronize them there. If our servers ever go down (they won't) then you want to be able to rely on local communication.
The local mesh is going to set up new follower devices over an open MQTT api and talk to each other over it - but yes it's more of an enable than a feature in and of itself.