Adding Matter Integration Causes Immediate Restart on Raspberry Pi 3

Configuration Matter/Thread
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to set up Matter/Thread on my Home Assistant installation but running into a critical issue with the Matter integration.

My Setup:

  • Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 (300MB free RAM)
  • Home Assistant Core: 2026.1.1
  • Supervisor: 2026.01.0
  • Home Assistant OS: 16.3
  • Thread Border Router: Nabu Casa ZBT-2

What’s Working:

  • Thread integration is installed and configured
  • Open Thread Border Router add-on is running successfully
  • ZBT-2 is connected

The Problem:
When I try to add the Matter integration (Settings > Devices & Services > Add Integration > Matter), Home Assistant immediately restarts (possibly the entire system - I can’t tell for certain). I can only see log messages after the restart making it hard to troubleshoot.

My Concerns:

  1. Could this be a memory issue? I have 300MB of free RAM - is that insufficient for running Matter alongside the Thread Border Router?
  2. Is the Raspberry Pi 3 even capable of handling Matter + Thread together?
  3. How can I capture logs before they get deleted during the restart?

What I’ve Tried:

  • Multiple attempts to add the integration with the same result
  • Googling for similar issues without finding relevant solutions

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

Pi3 is (for a while now) not capable of running bare HA, let alone additional addons. Official recommendation is at least 2GB of ram. Those 300MB of ram is very quickly filled, causing crash.
There were quite a number of reports about pi3 crashing randomly last year….
I guess it’s time to replace your old pi

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