Nabu Casa at the Matter Member Meeting

Blog
1

TL;DR: We represented Home Assistant, our community, and the Open Home vision at the Matter member meeting in Geneva. We’re hosting a live stream to talk Matter in January to update you about our progress and answer your questions. Leave your questions in the comments below!

Two weeks ago me, Marcel van der Veldt, and Stefan Agner, traveled to Geneva to represent Home Assistant, our community and the Open Home Vision at the Member Meeting of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). This is an important meeting where companies from all over the world meet to talk and decide about the Matter standard and how to implement it.

(Matter is the new smart home standard that promises to make everyone’s smart home devices work with each other across platforms and ecosystems, locally and privately. It’s being developed by the CSA, which is also responsible for Zigbee).

Stefan and Marcel

We were able to attend because Nabu Casa is a member of the CSA. We pay for this with the revenue from your Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions (thank you!). CSA membership ensures that we have access to official technical documentation and support to build Matter into Home Assistant. It also gives us a voice inside the CSA, which we use to advocate for the interests of Home Assistant users and our Open Home vision.

We love to attend these events and hear amazing stories from the people we meet. When talking with engineers working on Matter in the CSA, we noticed a lot of them run Home Assistant at their own homes and are enthusiastic supporters of the project! Talking to device manufacturers made us realize that Home Assistant is used as a test platform because our Matter server is the most flexible. This is great because it increases the likelihood that Matter devices work great in Home Assistant, as devices will have been implemented and tested on it!

Our participation in the development of Matter also means we’re in touch with engineers at other companies on a regular basis. One of the most popular Matter devices on the market right now, the Eve Energy Plug, has custom support for energy metering - a function not yet supported in the current Matter standard. The only way to see your energy usage was inside Eve’s own app. We’ve worked together with Eve, so we can now read the measurements from their plugs via custom Matter clusters and show them in Home Assistant! This feature will be available in the December release of Home Assistant. If you own Eve Energy Plugs, this is our early Christmas present for you.

Home Assistant and Matter

We haven’t just joined the CSA; we also have dedicated developers working on making sure that Matter is a first-class citizen within Home Assistant. In our eyes, it’s ideal for Home Assistant users because of the local nature of the protocol. It is our goal to make Home Assistant an officially certified Matter controller registered with the CSA.

To talk more about our ongoing progress with Matter, we’ll host a live stream in January. It will contain a full update on the state of Matter and go in-depth about what we have planned. We’ll announce the date soon.

We don’t want it to be just a stream of us talking Matter to you. We know you have many questions about Matter, things that are unclear, or that you want our help to understand. So please send us your burning questions in the comments below!

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/12/04/nabu-casa-at-the-matter-member-meeting
17 Likes
2

Matter with a Leviton Decora light switch used to disconnect about 25% of the time when HA was restarted, but ever since the latest integration update, it’s been rock solid.

3

Thanks a lot for sharing information about the Matter topic!
Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing Matter specification for local media player support implemented on Amazon Echo Dots (as discussed in this thread). That would allow us to stream local audio from Home Assistant to Echo Dots. Not sure if/when that happens, but it’d be great.

4

I dont have many matter devices but I originally has them on apple home before I got home assistant, so I have apple border routers and haven’t enabled matter support on my SkyConnect because I believe you have to reset all your zigbee devices to achieve this. So would my apple border routers allow me to add matter devices directly to home assistant? Or would I have to add them to HomeKit and share it with home assistant? Like I’m doing now

5

We haven’t looked into the local media player support within Matter yet as it is still maturing and device support is sparse. Pretty sure we’ll get to it at some point in the beginning of 2024.

2 Likes
6

If you already have existing Border Routers (such as the Apple Homepods) you will not need to set-up Home Assistant as Border router at all. Home Assistant will just leverage the existing thread network created by your existing Border Routers, independently of Apple Home.

In fact, multiple HomePods in your home home at strategic locations will easily outperform a single thread radio within your Home Assistant server/hub so it is actually recommended to use 3rd party Thread Border routers.

A common mistake is that in order to use Matter devices, you need a SkyConnect. That is not true as Matter over Wifi/ethernet devices will work without any additional radios, just your local network.

If you want to use Matter over Thread devices (you should be able to see both the matter logo and the thread logo on the box) then you need the so called “Thread Border router”, the device that connects the thread radio network with your home network. See it as an WiFi access point, but then for Thread devices. The mroe Thread border routers you add to your home, the better redundancy, speed and reliability you will have so that is a great benefit compared to traditional “single point of failure” Zigbee or Z-Wave.

Hope that helps a bit.

4 Likes
7

When will thread support for SkyConnect get out of beta?

8

That’s great, thanks for the info! So I know it’s still early days but is the plan of matter to be I could have some apple border routers and say some Alexa or home assistant border routers?

9

Are there any plans for HA to become a Matter bridge? For example, exposing an entity from HA to another Matter controller.

Similar to how we have a HomeKit Bridge and HomeKit Device:
image

Thanks in advance, great to see HA involved on this matter :grin:

10

Why is it that home assistant isn’t shown on evehome.com anywhere? Or at least I couldn’t find it. That seems strange to me.

11

Now if only they’d figure out the whole firmware update issue with matter devices that require the vendor app mess…

12

When we’re ready and all paths work. No sight on ETA yet.

2 Likes
13

At some point this is the idea yes, that multiple Border routers from different vendors can form one big Thread network or at least have “trusts” between networks. This is going to be solved at some point by the members of the Thread Group. For now, we’re stuck with multiple thread networks for each vendor.

2 Likes
14

Because Eve is not (yet) a Home Assistant partner.

15

Are European windows ( closed/tilted/open) supported in Matter?

16

Thanks for that! This is what I assumed

17

Are there any plans to make Thread work as a completely separated network, like Zigbee? I don’t get how we went from “wifi bad because internet access” to “zigbee good because no internet access” to “thread good because internet access”. Giving internet access to devices that don’t need it seems like a really bad idea, especially when people will just go for the cheapest stuff from random noname manufacturers. (Although named brands aren’t much better in terms of trustworthyness in terms of internet access)

3 Likes
18

Maybe at some day in the future but that is not what we have planned for now. Priority is now is becoming a fully functional Matter controller, which is challenging enough already.

2 Likes
19

This is why I decided to subscribe to the NabuCasa cloud, even if I barely use any other feature than exposing entities to Alexa / Google - as long as VA is still developing (and probably won’t be able to fully replace alexa in terms of other routines outside of HomeAssistant)

3 Likes
20

Thread by default has no internet access. I think you are confusing the fact that Thread is IP based with cloud/internet based ? Only if NAT64 is enabled on Thread border routers, the Thread devices will have internet access, by default that is not the case.

That said, you as a user define what devices you trust on your network, wether WiFi based, Thread based or whatever. So you have the choice of not going with Thread devices and stick with Z-Wave or Zigbee, those protocols wont go anywhere.

2 Likes