today was my first real contact with Home Assistant. I’ve already managed to integrate quite a few of my devices, but I’m really struggling with my Eve Thermostats.
Originally, they didn’t support Matter. So I added them to the Eve app first and did the firmware update to enable Matter support — everything is now fully up to date. After that, I removed the devices from Apple Home and went into Home Assistant → Integrations → Add Matter device, because I’m trying to build up HA step by step.
Current situation:
Eve Thermostat updated to latest firmware with Matter support
Added to Apple Home via Matter and updated successfully
Then removed from Apple Home (and Eve)
Now trying to add it to Home Assistant via the Matter integration
When I scan the Matter code in HA, it recognizes it correctly as a thermostat and starts loading… but after a long time, it just fails with an error saying the device couldn’t be added.
The weird part: I already have 3 Matter devices working fine in HA, but I can’t get any more to add now — no matter which one I try.
Does anyone have an idea what I might be doing wrong?
Firstly, Matter devices support multi-admin, so you can add them to HA while they are still part of Apple Home (assuming they use Matter for control and not HomeKit). Often this is the most reliable way to get devices enrolled in HA, as the HA app-based commissioning has a lot of steps that can fail. Using the apple-home-first method, you can even skip the app and commission directly via the HA matter dashboard (homeassistant.local:5580).
Secondly, once a device is added to Matter fabric, even if it’s removed, its initial QR code no longer works. It has to be factory reset to use the QR code it shipped with another time. Yes, this is annoying; HomeKit didn’t have this limitation.
Third, be sure your HA server has IPv6 enabled and set to auto. For some inexplicable reason, installing the Matter add-on doesn’t enable this by default (or even warn you) despite being required.
Finally, be sure that all three things (HAOS, your phone, and the Eve device) all must be on the same WiFi and-or VLAN for commissioning to succeed. This is an another limitation of the Matter protocol.
Yeah, my workaround for now was to add the devices to HomeKit first, then enable pairing via the device settings. After that, I added them to Home Assistant using the “existing device” option with the code shown in HomeKit. That actually works.
Is that the right way to do it?
What about devices that don’t support HomeKit — I wouldn’t be able to add those this way, right?
Also, I don’t really understand the IPv6 part. I’m not using IPv6 in my home network — I think my router (FritzBox) doesn’t even support it via DHCP. But here’s a screenshot of how my IPv6 settings look in HA!?
Apple changed the name of its ecosystem from HomeKit to Apple Home a few years ago, when they started supporting both Matter as well as the HomeKit protocols for control. A Matter device does not use the HomeKit protocol when it joins Apple Home, it uses Matter.
One of the features of IPv6 is that, when it’s enabled on a device, it will always assign itself a working “link local address” (LLA), allowing it to communicate with all other IPv6-enabled devices on the LAN. Even if the router has IPv6 disabled, devices will be able to talk to each other, they just can’t send traffic further than the local broadcast domain. So you do have IPv6, but your router is not participating.
Matter was designed to work with these LLAs so that people don’t get tripped up having to configure anything for IPv6.
