Matter Bridge - Including third Party Manufacture System in to My Matter Ecosystem

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Hi,

I’m currently working on a Smart Home product using Matter over Thread and Wi-Fi. I’m new to this field. From my understanding, we can control non-Matter end devices through a Matter Bridge.

I’ve gone through a few online documents related to Matter and learned that a Matter Bridge acts as a translator between non-Matter devices and the Matter ecosystem. It has two sides: one that communicates using the Matter model and another that handles non-Matter protocols.

According to the documentation, the Matter Bridge converts Matter commands into the protocol used by the non-Matter device and vice versa. It also creates a virtual Matter end device to represent each non-Matter device in the Matter ecosystem.

Now, let’s say we are using several non-Matter devices:

  • Zigbee (from Manufacturer_1)
  • Wi-Fi (from Manufacturer_2)
  • BLE (from Manufacturer_3)

These devices come from different manufacturers, use different SoCs, and implement their own security and encryption mechanisms.

My question is: In such a scenario, how can the Matter Bridge decode or understand the commands from these non-Matter devices (which may be proprietary or encrypted) and convert them into the Matter model, and vice versa?

Regards
Adarsh

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This is not really a Home Assistant question, but anyway…
The Matter bridge is presenting devices to the Matter fabric and receives commands from it and then converts it to an internal protocol.

The other side of your bride is a piece of code/application/plugin that understand the device you are connecting on that side, like BT, BLE, Zigee, Z-wave and so on, which it also translate into that internal protocol from before.
Now both sides can talk to each other over that internal protocol.

It is like Matter Fabric speaks Spanish.
The BT/BLE devices speak Chinese.
The Zigbee devices speak Swedish.
Your internal language on the Matter bridge is English and the sides side are just translating to/from English to whatever the devices need.

Like with languages there are sometimes not always a direct translation, so your code will have to find one that suites and sometimes there will be no way of translating it.
Matter is a strict protocol and Zigbee is a pretty open one, so something is possible in Zigbee that will not be possible in Matter.
Between those two side are a piece of code that translate one side’s “language” to the other side’s “language”.

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