I have HomeAssistant with OTBR and Matter with SkyConnect running since a few weeks and it’s stable and working flawlessy.
Eve Motion, Door and Plug, Nanoleaf Bulb and Strip, Aqara door, Onvis plug, door and button. (no Google, Apple or Amazon smart home devices in my house)
I also had lots of troubles at first but after a while I figured it out.
The nrfConnect Android app (also available for other platforms) helped a lot to see if devices are advertising over Bluetooth.
I paired all devices over the HA companion app.
At first the Google home app kept interfering. After removing and reinstalling this app it got better. I don’t use it, but without it Android didn’t notify about new devices. In the pairing assistant there is a step where an “other” app can be used to pair where I chose the companion app. Sometimes HA notified about new devices and I started pairing from there (this usually happened after restarting HA).
Recently I had still quite some troubles to make the Onvis Thread (Homekit) door sensor and button work reliably over Thread (they work fine over Bluetooth). When I commissioned them to Thread they became unavailable or they became available but after renaming or moving them to a difference room they became unavailable or just became unavailable without any cause after a few days.
I haven’t fully figured out what caused this, but it looks like mDNS was the culprit.
When one of the devices were reported by mDNS more than once, they became unavailable. So I had to wait until mDNS forgot about them and only then pair again.
I also had to make sure I could ping the devices over the IP addresses reported by mDNS. I added a route on my internet gateway that directs the Thread IPv6 prefixes over the OTBRs IPv6 address.
I’m not entirely sure if the mentioned measures were actually what fixed it in the end or if something else was the cause.
I made a lot of changes in my network during all the experimentation. I run HA in Docker and have another HA on a Raspi that I only use for the Thread and Matter add-ons, because I miserably failed at setting up Thread and Matter in Docker.
Before that I tried setting up HAOS with Thread and Matter add-on in KVM but that also didn’t work out. I also changed a lot related to IPv6 because I haven’t used it before and wanted to set it up properly not only for Thread. There were issues with Starlink that doesn’t officially support IPv6 yet. So it all was a big construction site with a lot going on and therefore difficult to pin down specific changes that made things work, especially with the Onvis Thread+Homekit devices that I experimented with for several weeks.
When I’m adventurous I’ll make another attempt to make OTBR+Matter run in Docker instead of Raspi. That should now be much easier after I know that the rest of my network is configured properly.
My biggest issue now is that I do not have a working mobile app for any of the Thread devices except Nanoleaf. The Nanoleaf app works reasonably well on Android and I could use it to configure the devices and install firmware updates.
The Aqara app looks good on Android as well except there is no support for the P2 sensor yet.
There are no Onvis or Eve apps for Android.
The iOS versions can’t be installed on the old iPhone 6 we have laying around because it requires a newer iOS than 12 which is the highest supported.
I could install them on my wife’s newer iPhone 12 though, but both apps didn’t show any useful functionality at all. Onvis only shows “unspecified error” or does nothing on any of the menus and buttons and the Eve app doesn’t let me add devices.
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