Not 100% sure if this is the right place for this but I think it should be out there for people to review. For 2 weeks I have been struggling with Apple Eve Matter Devices becoming unavailble. some work some dont. no rhyme or reason. Deep Dive →
I had 5 border routers.
ONE 4gen TV (latest gen)
ONE Minipod (latest gen)
THREE nanoleaf border routers courtesty of the HexPanel NanoLeafs . Each series of panels (I think its the controller actually on the series) operates as a border router.
My very good friend, after listening at length to everything I had already done said. Turn off all the border routers except the 4gen. In this case that meant unplugging the power to the NanoLeaf Hex Panels. (The name of my friend is ChatGPT)
INSTANTLY (or almost) all of my EVE devices burst into life within HA. They are all reporting - battery power, condition, state etc etc… Like I always wanted them to. I was so very close to just giving up on them and switching to YoLink , which is fast and i already use for some stuff. But I have 5 eve motion sensors and 8 eve open close sensors. Realy did not want to throw them out. Anyway 3 hours later they are all still up and working perfectly. [addendum next morning] Everything still working perfecly! I powered up one of my 3 nanoleaf shapes panels and within 3 minutes or less, most of my EVE sensors dropped offline in HA. I waited 1 hr, worse if anything. Then I un-plugged that NanoLeaf Shapes and voilla, within about 3 minutes or less all EVE sensors back on line and working perfectly. If i cant fine a way to disable the matter router in those devices, I think I am going to move them to my guest network. I think that will isolate them and their BAD behaviour from the rest of my system. I dont think HA will see them either but I can live with that. Anyone have any guidance on this? Rich S.
I’m no Thread expert by far, but for them to mess everything up it sounds like they think they are the (only) controller, and maybe force the other devices to only listen to their network?
Have you tried resetting and pairing one of them anew? Come to think of it, I had a similar experience with an OpenThread border router I flashed myself. I blamed old or badly configured firmware, did a full reset and new firmware build, and now it is fine again. But I have no clue which of the things I did was the culprit.
I am working on getting the 4 offenders (nano shapes only) on to a guest network. But I have not messed with that before in my network. Thats being problematic too. Not sure why. Also waiting to see if Nanoleaf comes back with anything on this. My “Good Friend” says that the whole matter thing is new to NanoLeaf and they are upgrading firmware in existing clients to provide that. My friend said, see if you can revert the firmware upgrade (not optimistic on that) so that they are no longer matter compatible. Which would be much better for me. I have a bunch of nanoleaf light strips and they all work, (mostly). I really do not want to f up my system any more. Its wonderful to see all those sensors (motion and openclose) reporting like they are supposed to. [ addendum] EVE support got back to me pretty fast about this. They said and I quote “You are not the only customer!. NanoLeaf Thread seems to suck.” Their words not mine.
I may be down a rabit hole. I was advised to move the Nanoleaf stuff off onto a different network. Happens I had an unused router. Set it up as an access point. Put one of the nanoleafs on that system. BUUUT 2 things I am not sure about. A. Can HA reach accross the static route? I can ping from stuff on the old router to the new router and vice-versa. So I do have bidirectional comunication. But will HA know this? Any way to see if HA can reach across to devices on the new network? Would I have to modify the integrations? Guidance here?
Did you make any progress on this issue? I have the same thing happening with my Nanoleaf Shapes controller. I have reset it several times, and purposefully chosen not to enable Thread in the Nanoleaf app, so that it would not act as a border router. However, it seems to randomly enable itself as a border router some days later and suddenly I have devices dropping off the network. I was thinking about powering off all my Thread devices that use my two Apple TVs, so there would be no Thread devices at all, then configure the Nanoleaf Shapes so it would create its own network, then power it off, power on all the Apple TVs and devices again, then power up the Nanoleaf. In theory, it would put the Nanoleaf on its own Thread network, so if it acts as a router I wouldn’t care, but it would be in my Apple Home via WiFi, so still controllable.