Home Assistant and Thread

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I have been using the Wemo Smart Plugs ( WSP80) to work with Home Assistant after hearing about Home Assistant a couple years ago via the TechPod podcast and it has worked great. I have display cabinet lighting set up and I have the light in my living room set up with Wemo to come on with the degree of the suns angle at night.

After hearing their interview with the head of HA on their companion podcast FossPod and the HomePod episode they did about Thread, I bought some WSP100 which use bluetooth/thread not WIFI thus don’t work with HA or even the WEMO app. The exclusively use Apple Home which is grossly inadequate compared to HA. Is there support or is there support coming for Thread in Home Assistant?

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Summary:

  • Nabu Casa has announced SkyConnect hardware supporting both Zigbee and Thread at the same time.
  • Thread is Zigbee with a different addressing scheme
  • Apple Homekit support for Bluetooth devices is starting to work well, with more coming (see the 2022.08 release party video).

The epic Matter / Thread post has lots of information:

If this helps, :heart: this post!

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so currently HA Yellow can connect to a thread network and the USB stick will do the same thing if plugged into a raspberry pi running HA in theory allow for thread enabled devices to be a part of HA?

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Also see Chip / Matter support (including Thread)

Home Assistant Yellow contains a UART/GPIO radio module based on the same type of Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 SoC that the Home Assistant SkyConnect USB Stick is based on, so yes they will be able to do the exact same thing, however, I believe that the Thread (and Matter over Thread) part is not ready for end-users as of yet, which I think is the reason why the Home Assistant SkyConnect USB Stick](Home Assistant SkyConnect - official radio USB dongle will be compatible with both Zigbee and OpenThread (including Matter/CHIP over Thread)) has been made available for purchase as of yet. That is, right now I believe that the end-users who have already received their Home Assistant Yellow can only use the Zigbee part as of yet and not yet the Thread part? There are some development discussions between the developers here → https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/discussions/894

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Any update on how to connect Home Assistant to a Thread: Border Router?

I’m looking at something like Kirale’s Border Router:
https://www.kirale.com/products/ktbrn1/

Though I’ve read that Amazon Echo Show (latest generation) devices are also Thread: Border Routers.

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Only experimental support for the Home Assistant SkyConnect USB dongle yet when choose to enable it in their Silicon Labs multiprotocol addon which flash RCP Multi-PAN firmware → Home Assistant SkyConnect - official radio USB dongle will be compatible with both Zigbee and OpenThread (including Matter/CHIP over Thread)

(low-level details in development discussions here → https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/discussions/894)

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Did you get the WSP100 to work with HAP over Thread using HomeKit Controller? I’m not able to connect to the WSP100 using the HoneKit Controller.

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