Aqara has recently released Matter-over-Thread light switches in the EU and in the US. The switch’s home page describes Aqara’s proprietary “MARS” tech that synchronizes a smart light’s on/off status with the switch. However, it only works over Zigbee and only with Aqara bulbs. I wonder if this would be possible to do with HA over Matter, as well.
That’s essentially a fancy name for Zigbee bindings.
Matter supports bindings too, as long as you have a Matter switch that allows binding to a Matter light you’ll be able to achieve the same. Setting the bindings is cumbersome though, a user published a script to simplify them.
Edit: According to the compliance document at CSA, the Aqara H2 switch does NOT support Matter binding to a light.
<feature>Does the device implement the on/off cluster as a client?</feature>
...
<support>false</support>
Thanks, that clears it up. Marcel wrote the bindings support in Home Assistant was planned for 2024, so, hopefully, we will see it soon. Do switches and lights have to support the on/off cluster as a client and a server for this binding to work?
Every Matter light implements the server part (the Matter controller would be the client) and they don’t need anything special.
The requirement is that the switch you want to bind has the client of the feature you want to control like on/off, brightness level or color.
The switch also has to support the binding cluster -so the controller can tell the switch, “hey, start sending commands to that light”-, which of course the H2 doesn’t support either. But, even if it has the binding cluster, if the client/server does not match there’s no communication possible.
I asked Aqara’s support about this. They said there are no plans to add Matter binding support in the short term. Though, there is no way of knowing if that were an LLM-generated response.
Wise answer given the Matter over Thread P2 door sensor launched two years ago and the promised firmware update to enable the included smart button never happened. Also, I believe the P2 motion sensor never got the firmware update with the features that were announced to control sensitivity and anti-tampering.
I would only buy (insert brand here) if it works for my use case as it is out of the box.
1 Like