Apologies for the lame question, just trying to avoid buying yet another gadget, which I might not really need. According to this article Alexa adds iOS Setup, Thread support, and surpasses 100 million Matter-enabled Echos (amazon.com) Amazon is not only adding Matter, but also Thread Border Router support, does that means that I don’t need any other gateway like ZBDongle or SkyConnect for non-Matter enabled devices like Eve Aqua? Would that be supported in HA or it’s hard to say yet? I have Alexa Show 8 and it’s updated with Matter, but I don’t understand how to configure it as TBR if possible at all?
Thank you in advance for all your insights!
I have the same question! Surprising there are no answer for this question i could find to this answer
Any answer to this? I just added my skyconnect and see under “Other Networks” in “Thread Settings” this:
AMZN-Thread-4c57
1 border router
Looks like one of my echos already has a border router. Could I use this one instead of the ha border router add on?
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I follow a lot of discussions on this forum as well as Discord, and I’ve only seen a couple of users try out an Amazon TBR, and what the discussions seem to say is that it has not yet matured/stable at least compared to Apple or Google TBRs. To answer your question, in theory, yes you should be able to use it instead of an HA OTBR. You would join a Thread Matter device to Alexa, and next the Alexa App should (but don’t know for sure) have a way to open up a commissioning window so that can go into HA Matter and have HA Matter commission the same device on to the HA Matter Fabric.
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Yes.
I have some HomeKit-over-Thread devices, HA would discover them via bluetooth and control them via bluetooth. If you want to have it attached to thread, you MUST have a preferred Thread network.
And I did not see a way to get credential of Alexa Echo for this purpose. So yes, you must have an extra dongle or run a TBR where you can import its network credential to HA.
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Home assistant see the Echo border router, but there is no button to make it the preffered network. Am I missing something, or is it just not possible?
I do not want to buy another device (homekit, google or another border router), so I will try again with the SkyConnect stick and the HA border router. No luck so far though adding devices with iOS (it always said you need a Thread Border Router). But I just saw that I am running iOS 16.0 and the docu recommends 16.3 or higher.
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So digging deeper into this, in particular by studying this page: Thread - Home Assistant, I understand that I had to import the credentials for amazon thread network, then a (i) appears and I can make the network my preferred network. Unfortunately, when I press the “import credentials” button in the home companion app, it does not work
I understand that it may not work with amazon thread networks, but I do not understand the error message (“no preferred network found”) - since this is what I am trying to add …
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The import credentials option is there to sync the network data between the host instance and the mobile device so that you can import the devices when you add them via the companion app.
This video explains the current implementation of thread and matter and how they work:
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