Matter in Home Assistant workshop announcement

I am running on Intel NUC with proxmox with latest supervisor, OS etc. I have an old USB BT adapter (CSR 4.0 Wireless Bluetooth USB 4.0 CSR Dongle Adapter Receiver for PC Windows 7 8 10 | eBay) and I had to pass it to home assistant VM using proxmox UI. Home assistant container is able to see the ‘btusb’ device. I know that the adapter is working, because I can use hcitool command in homeassistant container and see results of scan. But when I try to commission the Matter device using instructions here, no bluetooth activity seems to be happening. Is there any way to turn on debug logs in Matter server add-on? How does matter-add con container access the USB BT adapter? Thanks.

Managed to get back to the matter story today. On Wednesday I did not get the C3 board via developer options into the WLAN, I had to do it in the console of the ESP, but then I had problems with the key pairing. Im on HAOS (Nuc)

Today I tried it again, there was also an update from the Matter server, but again I had the problem that over the developer tools the Wifi access data are not passed through. In the console nothing happened. Then the key pairing was successful this time. Has anyone had similar experiences? Also have the TP UB 500 where I am otherwise of the opinion that this does not run completely round in terms of discovering

Since I don’t have a working BLE setup yet, I used the “matter wifi” command on the C3 board to connect it to WiFi. Then I was able to use it to commission to chip-tool using “chip-tool pairing onnetwork-long 123456 20202021 3840”. Now I can control the C3 light using chip-tool. But it would be nice if I could now also commission this device into Home Assistant Matter Server. The reverse of this was shown in the workshop - i.e. once C3 device was commissioned into device in HA using BLE, it was shown how to add it to chip-tool. But I don’t know how to use chip-tool to put device into commissioning mode again.so HA would discover it.

I’m not sure how to do it through chip-tool, but you could try just resetting the board with matter device factoryreset and starting over. One thing to note, I was able to get it into HA over wifi (also don’t have BLE) by first connecting with matter wifi but when calling the commission service, I had to use the ManualPairingCode rather than the QRCode string.

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I don’t run Proxmox as I installed HAOS direct from the disk image installation page. I can see that the system recognises the adapter via the SSH terminal ub500
I don’t however see it listed in the hardware section of HASSIO so no idea how to proceed with this.

Tried lsusb?

It would be nice to have a second firmware build with a different hard coded pairing such that I can add a second Matter light. Or even better a configurable or esp ID generated pairing key.

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Yes it shows the device at Bus 001 Device 002 as per this:
ub500_2

I resolved the problem by using the bluetoothctl command via the ssh terminal. I found that the adapter was actually listed and working. So now I have the matter device all up and running :slight_smile:

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@tboyce1 Can you please post how you got the device into HA over WiFi without BLE? I tried to use ManualPairingCode as you suggested, but I am not having any success or seeing anything in the matter add-on logs.

I’d suggest uninstalling the add-on and the integration, restarting, then install them again to start with a clean slate.

On the device:

matter device factoryreset
matter wifi "SSID" "password"
matter ble adv stop
matter onboardingcodes onnetwork

Leave the console window open on the device because this is where you can tell if it’s working. In HA, call the services matter_experimental.set_wifi (not sure if you really need this since it’s already connected, but I did it anyway) then matter_experimental.commission and put in the ManualPairingCode.

At this point, you should see it trying to commission the device in the console window. Sometimes this just fails and I have no idea why. It will get added to the fabric and set the state to “operational node” but then after some time (30 seconds or so) it gets removed and goes back to “commissionable node”. If that happens, just start over with the factory reset and try again. I just tested this process again and it worked on the second attempt. Good luck!

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Thanks - I can reliably pair with chip-tool add-on every time. But when I try exact procedure with matter.set_wifi and matter.commission,nothing happens. I just get following in ha error log.

2022-06-21 09:01:36 ERROR (MainThread) [custom_components.matter_experimental.adapter] Failed to inteview node: Command failed: CHIP Error 0x00000032: Timeout

Curiously, “matter onboarding onnetwork” and “matter onboarding ble” print same ManualPairingCode (34970112332) but a slightly different QR Code string (MT:Y.K90AFN00KA0648G00 vs MT:Y.K9042C00KA0648G00 )

I am going to let this sit for a while and come back to it once things become more stable.

The QR string probably encodes the “method” of commission in it whereas the manual pairing code is just the code itself and up to the software to pick the right method.

Just FYI, if it’s already paired to the chip-tool then the process is likely different. In that case, you’d have to figure out how to make chip-tool open the commissioning window for the device since it would no longer be commissionable after being paired. But if it’s not doing anything even right after a factory reset, then yeah, probably just have to wait for things to get ironed out a bit more.

Just curious on this:

Will Home Assistant be able to both control Matter devices and take other devices and bridge them out to a Matter network? My thought is perhaps this renders the HomeKit Bridge integration redundant and we can just bridge out things to it in an “official” way.

Thanks - I was able to get HA to discover the device a couple of times after some factory resets. But it was very non-deterministic process. With chip-tool it is very deterministic process. Such is life with early release software

I’d be interested in this as well. From what I understand, Matter will support bridges for non-Matter devices so I would have to imagine HA could act as a bridge.

What gets really interesting is if it could bridge cloud devices this way as well even though Matter is supposed to be local. I’m sure it’s technically possible, but would it be considered “official”?

In that case, could something like a Nest thermostat only expose itself as a bridge and control the thermostat through the cloud API, thus creating a loophole where the Nest thermostat “supports” Matter but is still only controllable through Google’s servers?

I predict lots of loopholes. I doubt providers are going to rely on quality, features and service to keep you in their ecosystem.

Hopefully, I’m too much of a pessimist.

FYI, Nabu Casa / Home Assistant founders also announced they are making an official Home Assistant SkyConnect USB Stick RF adapter/dongle HW compatible with Matter/CHIP over Thread and Zigbee:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-skyconnect-usb-stick-announced-will-be-compatible-with-both-zigbee-and-thread-including-matter-chip-over-thread/433594

My wish list:

  1. Second firmware build. OR
  2. Ability to change pairing and mac
  3. Config that also exposes buttons
  4. maybe a follow up workshop.

This is a good exercise on integration, whether or not this is final version.

There is a very raw implementation of matter device in nodejs that may be of interest,

I have tried to make it work with HA (with onnetwork setup code), but somehow, HA is unable to complete the process of integrating it into HA after successfully pairing. This issue has some details: