FYI, wanted to give others a heads-up DavidvtWout has begun working on a external Matter component for the ESPHome firmware:
He looks to be progressing nicly even though the project is only being worked on in his spare time as an independent developer.
This project is still in early-development so don’t expect a perfectly working setup. Both matter-over-wifi and matter-over-thread are now working. It’s possible to commission a device to a matter controller, but many features are still missing.
Treat this component as an experimental preview. It is usable for testing, but the public YAML interface is not stable yet: action, cluster, attribute, and endpoint names may still change and break existing configurations.
Anyway, this is something that ESPHome community has been waiting a long time for, as per this feature request discussion from 2021:
DavidvtWout has also opened a “Discussions” section in his esphome-matter repository dedicated for that specific project (which for now is a ESPHome external component for Matter support that he is currently developing on his own):
Those interested in helping out might also want to join developers on ESPHome’s Discord Server where there is a thread about Matter:
His discussions section in his is meant to post on-going open-ended discussion threads specifically for his project to discuss general questions, feedback and ideas (for example feature requests and feedback that are for non-issues/bugs, instead of posting those under issues in his repo).
PS: Those who have an interest in this might also have an interest at looking at zigbee_esphome by luar123 for reference as another external component for ESPHome, both as it uses ESP-IDF and because Zigbee shares a lot of similarities with Matter under the hood: