Act as a Matter bridge

I am having trouble getting alexa to find the matterbridge instance. I have setup the add-on and I can see the logs and QR code.

Scanning the QR code shows “Connecting to your device…” and then eventually fails with the message “Alexa can’t connect to your device”

I suspect that this has to do with my network/VLAN config where my alexa is on the 192.168.30.x subnet and my HA installation is on the 192.168.50.x subnet.

I have firewall (OPNsense) rules to allow any device from the .30 subnet to access the HA server over TCP/UDP on all ports (for testing).

I also have the mDNS forwarder service enabled and working for ESPHome, where the ESPs are on the .30 subnet and ESPHome is on the .50 subnet.

Does anyone know of anything else that I might need?

Thanks.

Problem where fans are mistakenly exposed as lights or switches.

That’s currently an intended workaround: Feature Request: add support for fans · Issue #70 · t0bst4r/matterbridge-home-assistant · GitHub

Hey so this isn’t your exact scenario, but the home assistant docs for matter say that devices must be in the same LAN/VLAN as HA. Googling around shows similar results. I thought I’d seen something more official about matter not supporting different vlans (!!) but can’t find it now.

I know people handle the subnetting different ways. In my case HA, matterbridge, & alexa devices are on the main trusted vlan. Other iot, esphome, etc devices are on a separate ssid & subnet. Home assistant is of course able to reach them, mDNS forwarding works, but then everything is open between matterbridge & alexa.

Thanks for pointing that out for me. I’ve always considered HA as more “trusted” than all the devices and appliances, perhaps it is time to demote HA to the IoT VLAN.

does this work with smartthings? has anyone tried?

Yes, it works with smart things at least for me.

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I’m a little bit lost I’m using HA as docker solution, then I cannot add addons, in your comments you’ve also said this right?

How can I manually install it? For others I’ve just upladed a folder to my volume

You can run it as a separate docker container, addons are mainly docker containers.
I also ran HA in Docker for years but thinking about moving to HAOS.

Forgive me if I’m being a bit thick here, but I can’t seem to figure out how to use this add-on? I would like to share some non-matter smart plugs that are connected to HA with my Google Home, so I can control them with my existing smart speakers. How do I do that? Or am I just not understanding what this is for?

Question for HomeKit users, is there an advantage on using this plugin instead of the HomeKit bridge integration?
Maybe better performance or availability?

My Amazon devices aren’t in my “trusted” vlan either. I run home assistant as a vm in proxmox, so I gave the vm a second network connection my IoT vlan to get this to work. This comes with its own set of issues, but I did get it work.

My HomeKit bridge(s) have been extremely stable for years so I haven’t thought about trying anything else. I don’t really see an advantage as both run locally and “works with HomeKit” is more mature than Matter at this time. I am using this with my echos and it has been pretty stable. The Alexa app often shows some (not all) devices as unresponsive, but they still work.

Where is the config file located? I want to try including/excluding domains etc, but I could not find this in the home assistant directories. A screenshot from the earlier version shows this was at one stage configurable from the ui, will this come back?

Has anyone gotten a lock to work with google assistant? I am using Home-Assistant-Matter-Hub3.0.0-alpha.26 and whenever I try to unlock a lock, Google responds with, “Sorry, I cannot unlock the *** remotely.”

It looks like the code sets this up correctly (home-assistant-matter-hub/packages/backend/src/matter/behaviors/lock-server.ts at 2e239b7e194952b91a8b8e2540f7b6cf4c825c55 · t0bst4r/home-assistant-matter-hub · GitHub) so I’m guessing it is just a limitation with how google handles matter devices. I was interested in other people’s feedback though.

Edit:
Looks like this is a limitation of Google Home :-1: Answered: matter smart lock with Google Home App issue - Google Nest Community

I worked around this by creating a template switch that unlocks the lock when switched off and exposed switch to matter. The downside is that I have to say “Turn off” lock instead of “unlock”.

I have a Yale zwave lock connected to Alexa via the matter bridge. It works, but I think it asked for my pin before unlocking.