Matter in Home Assistant workshop announcement

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Matter is a new smart home standard that is scheduled to launch in fall. Across the industry, companies like Hue, IKEA, Google and Apple are working together to try and solve connectivity, ease of setup and interoperability once and for all. Development is happening as part of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) of which we (Nabu Casa) are also a participating member.

We’ve been hard at work on Matter support for Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Yellow hub will come with a radio that supports Thread, required to talk to low power Matter devices. We also have some tricks up our sleeves for devices used to run Home Assistant without such a radio, like Raspberry Pi’s. We want to show what we’re up to and allow you to test it out.

On June 15 @ 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CET we will be hosting our free Matter in Home Assistant workshop.

The workshop will be held on YouTube. Go to the listing to set a reminder to be notified when we start.

The workshop will contain two parts. In the first part we will talk about what Matter is and how it will work in Home Assistant. In the second part we will walk you through how to add experimental Matter support to your Home Assistant installation and integrate your first Wi-Fi based Matter device.

The workshop will be free but you will need a couple of things if you want to be able to follow along with the second part:

  • Home Assistant OS 8.0 or newer (Matter relies on an add-on and Bluetooth)
  • Home Assistant Community Store installed
  • Espressif ESP32-C3-DevKitM-1 ($9 @ Mouser, €17 @ Conrad) or an M5Stamp C3 ($6 @ M5Stack)
  • Bluetooth. If you use a Raspberry Pi to run Home Assistant you’re set. If you have a Home Assistant Blue or another device without Bluetooth, get a Bluetooth USB adapter that is supported by Home Assistant OS (like this one).

Even if you can’t follow along, it will still be an informative session!

It is possible to get the experimental Matter support working with other Home Assistant installation methods and other dev kits, but we won’t be covering those in our workshop.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2022/05/29/matter-in-home-assistant-workshop-announcement/
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sounds exciting. will join.

on the Espressif, unknown to ESP32 personally just yet, and it costing 8,55 E only, but shipping 20 E… is this a device we can use in HA for useful things other than the experiment in the Workshop? :wink:
or will other devices do as well?

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The reason we use this specific dev kit is because it has an onboard LED that will be exposed via Matter. I looked and found that it’s for sale on Reichelt, which should offer better shipping in Europe. I will update the initial blog post.

You will be able to use this dev kit with ESPHome, but it is using ESP-IDF directly so a bit more complicated (not a beginner ESPHome device).

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tyvm!
ordered.

will have my struggles with it, but at least can follow the Workshop. what better way to start with ESPHome than the future of HA.
So cool.

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Unfortunately it’s sold out at Reichelt. Anybody know any alternatives for Netherlands?

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I think PiHut ship to NL:

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Oops, that went fast :sweat_smile:

Conrad has them too. (thanks for the tip @JIhnow) Will update the blog post again.

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Got mine too on Gotronic for French user.

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Still also very curious to hear more about mentioned Zigbee 3.0 certification plans for Home Assistant.

Does Nabu Casa also have plans to employ devs to work on ZHA and its zigpy dependencies?

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Will this event be recorded or repeated? looks great!

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Until now it’s only “dark” matter what we are talking about. Time and again it’s delayed so I’m not worried at all.

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?
It is double/triple the cost of regular esp32.

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Update: We didn’t realize the devkit was so hard to get so Stefan created a firmware for the M5Stamp C3.

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Is it really about the onboard LED? I guess you need the ESP32 for Bluetooth, but is there anything else?

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They sell these on Aliexpress. With two weeks to go if we order today we might get it until start. :smiley: Considering the price and the lack of availability, it might be worth to take a chance.

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Good question.
It would be interesting to know what the specifics/requirements are.

I have a bunch of clone WROOM-32, and would want to know if those are usable (after recompilation of the firmware, ofc)

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Home Assistant OS 8.0 or newer (Matter relies on an add-on and Bluetooth)

Is there any chance that the Home Assistant Container users could be provided with a link to the container being used by the Matter add-on so that we can spin it up and follow along as well?

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Also a Docker user who would love to follow along using containers. +1 from me!

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For the UK, Pimoroni have the M5Stamp C3 in stock on 01/06, whick I can now reveal after ordering two for myself! :slight_smile:
Pimoroni are a decent bunch in Sheffield (famous for not being by the sea, despite their pirate claims!) who have sold me far too much small shiny things over the years.

A quick look at the M5Stamp circuit diagram, shows a neopixel SK6812 connected to GPIO2. An adventurous soul might attempt a cross-compile to another ESP32 variant with a bit of WS2812 tape connected the same pin and 3V3, but finding an in-stock dev board seems a lot more likely to be successful to me.

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RE: FM17

Is there any chance that the Home Assistant Container users could be provided with a link to the container being used by the Matter add-on so that we can spin it up and follow along as well?

They sort of touched on this in the announcement:

“It is possible to get the experimental Matter support working with other Home Assistant installation methods and other dev kits, but we won’t be covering those in our workshop.”

That said, while I don’t expect any sort of formal walkthrough, I’d love a link to the Matter add-on repository so I can figure it out myself (and potentially help others) before the workshop.

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