In theory? For multi-br, pretty much. In practice? I don’t know how reliable a good mesh will be in the face of route churn. If the route replacement code in NetworkManager is atomic, then HAOS 10 will be usable for most people. If it’s not, I’d expect blips. But I think the blips would have to be blippy enough to cause packet loss to notice the disruption. It could be fine most of the time in practice and recover quickly if it does cause a problem. For a lot of people it might be fine. Where I expect issues is where you have a BR that doesn’t implement the TREL extension (like Apple). If you have a HomePod that is the primary router and it’s in room with poor mesh connectivity, then you will not have access to the mesh. TREL will let the mesh use your WiFi and Ethernet to help avoid mesh splits, avoiding this issue.
1 BR with HAOS 10 will be fine. SkyConnect should be fine.
I do have some of this running on my main HA (because I “eat my own dog food”. But I’d generally encourage anyone that wants bullet proof HA to avoid thread and matter for the time being.
Yeah… however, I’m a dive in kinda guy. My main motivator for wanting thread is I have Level Lock Bolts on my three exterior doors. Right now they are bluetooth with thread activation “coming soon”. The ESP BT Proxy works (I use two to reach my locks), but it’s 1-30s to activate the lock - which makes me not so popular with the family. My house is like an Apple Store so I have 7 BRs throughout and so almost any Thread device I have would be in the same room as a BR.
Also, those locks would be my only thread devices (well, I do have one wemo outlet I bought to play with), so I wouldn’t have a great (any) mesh at first.
Who knows, maybe by the time Level releases the Thread firmware update, this issue will be solved on the HAOS side.
Quick Google shows they’re on rc3 which means it’ll likely be out soon, don’t think they have an actual release schedule though I could be wrong.
On the topic of nanoleaf, I picked up a 3 pack of the matter enabled essentials bulbs and getting them to work was pretty painless.
Pairing through the HA app didn’t work for whatever reason, but once I linked it to nanoleaf app, I could go into bulb settings, press connect matter, and it gave me a choice of apps I had installed including HA. Once I hit HA it took a minute then when it was done it showed up in HA under the matter integration and automatically connected to the HA thread network, which I was even able to verify in the nanoleaf app.
Apparently the elements I’m using for the old essentials apparently needs firmware 7.5 (coming soon) to support the matter bulbs over thread, but I may switch all my bulbs over to the HA thread network.
But in any case, it’s nice to see that as long as you have a thread radio you should be able to get the new bulbs into HA without needing a home kit specific thread router or the amazing hackery of this entire thread.
The new bulbs are also maybe about 20% lighter too interestingly enough.
In any case, thanks for all the hard work in being able to make the old bulbs as usable as they are, saved me a ton of buyers remorse
is not going to be great. The HomePod is by far the closest BR to my nanoleafs (nanoleaves?) and so it would be the primary. Therefore even with HAOS 10, I’ll still end up losing connectivity (which I feel I’ve actually seen more frequently since upgrading to HAOS 10 - although I seem to think in the past I had to reboot, whereas now I just restart).
If your apple BR is close to the nanoleaves is probably good for the mesh health.
To clarify, the currently active BR is not a function of proximity, it’s somewhat random. It can change on a whim. So you can’t predict which will be the main one at any given time.
Also I’ve not seen a hybrid apple and google setup before, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have 2 separate thread networks.
HAOS10 solves ghost routes and fixes neighbour unreachability detection. But there are still other issues to track down, some of which were probably masked by network manager bugs in the previous version.
I think I misunderstood the TREL feature - but I get it now. And yeah, I should have been a little more clear wrt to the BRs - yes, I do have 2 separate thread networks.
So with HAOS 10 the merry-go-round starts again! I guess that’s the joy of new tech - squashing one set of bugs often reveals that there are more hidden deeper in the cupboard. Fair enough - time for me to start collecting logs and searching bugs for other similar reports.
Since updating to HAOS 10 I’ve also had my nanoleafs be unavailable twice, whereas that didn’t happen before. Are there any relevant logs I can share next time it happens?
I’m going to guess that as a starting point one could try going to Developer Tools → Services and paste the following (and then press “Call Service”). Note that depending on your network, there may be a lot of traffic:
I finally got to play around with the new HomeKit architecture. It looks like the Home app uses the HAP “add pairing” service to make sure that both your phone & the HomePod mini are paired to accessories. Interesting. I can see both devices authenticating to my fake accessory script. I don’t know how the Home app asks the BR for cached state currently. But it appears to be a backwards compatible design.
My main motivator for wanting thread is I have Level Lock Bolts on my three exterior doors. Right now they are bluetooth with thread activation “coming soon”. The ESP BT Proxy works (I use two to reach my locks), but it’s 1-30s to activate the lock - which makes me not so popular with the family. My house is like an Apple Store so I have 7 BRs throughout and so almost any Thread device I have would be in the same room as a BR.