I bought a few Matter light bulbs for kicks. I’d like to add it to Home Assistant.
I’ve been able to get the Home Assistant app to find the matter device. My firewall gives its an IPv4 address, and my firewall is configured for IPv6. My Home Assistant server exists in different VLAN as the wifi. The process gets all the way to end where it is supposed to be added to Home Assistant, but then it errors out.
Am I doing this wrong? Should have I have Matter router for this purpose and not my regular wifi?
Matter uses multicast discovery when it is commissioning a device, and multicast is confined to a subnet (i.e. LAN/VLAN). There are “hacks” that allow multicast to traverse from one subnet to another, but in general don’t work very well.
So I’m able to go through the entire process, up until adding it to HA. Since the HA mobile app knows the IP address of the server, I don’t see multicast being needed here. It’s just the adding to HA where it dies.
The Mobile App is telling HA’s Matter Server to commission a new device but doesn’t tell the Matter Server the address of the device. The Matter Server instead waits for mDNS-SD (which is multicast) from the device to show up. It uses mDNS-SD to learn the IP address of the device and then starts various sessions with the device to commission it. The problem is that mDNS-SD sent from the device on one LAN/VLAN is not reaching the Matter Server on another LAN/VLAN.