If I try to add a device via the Home Assistant Companion app, it gets stuck at either "Searching for device" or "Connecting to device".
I can successfully add Matter-over-Thread devices via Samsung Smartthings (v2 hub with ZBT-1 set up through HA).
I can then successfully Multi-Admin MoT devices to Home Assistant. I've done it with 3 different IKEA devices types (air monitor, AC plug, and battery leak sensor). I can then remove from Smartthings and the devices stay in HA.
This is annoying, though! I'd much rather add the devices directly to HA. This whole thing started because I want to get off of Smartthings.
It seems Samsung uses a proprietary Matter-adding software, and that HA uses the onboard Android one (it has the same interface as Google Home and the IKEA app). So perhaps it's an issue with Google?
Things I've tried:
- Changing my phone's "preferred" Thread network from an old dead one to my current one on my ZBT-1 by deleting Google Play Services data (ugh) and installing the Google Home (for the first time).
- Setting my WiFi credentials manually in HA settings
- Manually adding the device by code
- Scanning the device QR
Still looking for help with this. Also, another thing telling me it's a Google issue: I added this HA App in order to control via Google Assistant: GitHub - RiDDiX/home-assistant-matter-hub: Publish your Home-Assistant Instance using Matter. · GitHub. I am not able to add it via Google Home on either of 2 Android phones, using 2 separate Google accounts. I can add it via Smartthings without issue, though in this case Multi-Admin does not work and suffers the same issue. It hangs on "Connect this device to your Google Account".
I did find these potentially relevant log items in that app:
Matter mDNS is advertising a global IPv6 address that controllers may not reach on the LAN, so devices can show No Response (#361). Set mdns-strip-global-ipv6 if devices stay unreachable.
Matter mDNS is advertising on several interfaces including likely Docker-internal ones, so controllers may show devices as offline (#361). Set mdns-network-interface to your LAN interface. Interfaces: enp0s3 (10.8.1.45), hassio (172.30.32.1), docker0 (172.30.232.1), wpan0 (fd23:7640:6af0:1458:0:ff:fe00:fc11).
The curious part is that I assume if mDNS was an issue then Smartthings would also have a problem. Similarly, I can see my printer on my network.
I changed mdns-network-interface to my ethernet card, and that seems to have resolved the error. I still can't connect, though.
I did end up resolving this. The first thing I did was found a setting on my Linksys router called "Express Forwarding" and turned it off. I'd heard that this could vaguely mess with IoT stuff, and it did (I think it messes with mDNS).
The next thing required me to change the preferred Thread network on my phone. Since Google stores this and you can't change it (at least in Android 11) without the incredibly destructive clearing of Google Play Services data, I did the following: Thread network recreated without resetting Google Play Services data - #5 by ToddBonzalez
