Hi all, reasonably new to HA, got all my basic stuff set up and have seen while searching many topics that wifi devices are not always the greatest solution so before I go too much further I’m looking to change to one of the 3 above. Zigbee, Matter and Thread. I have been heavily trawling threads but either they are over 2 years old or related more to other regions availability of product.
This is mainly pointed at Aus/Kiwi’s due to our limitation of local products.
I have a sonoff dongle p on its way and was going to zigbee light bulb the house for repeaters but was disapointed to see (if I can even order ikuu zigbee, mitre10 wont stock it only wifi) that only the bulbs and certain wall sockets were repeaters so I would need then a different brand which are not so competitively priced i.e hue (which I am pretty sure I can just pair directly with the sonoff p dongle).
I then realised that it seems people are going the way of matter/thread. I have a tapo hub which I just recently bound to matter in my HA but my understanding is that it’s still tapo just it’s connectivity has altered so I can’t connect anything non tapo to it.
For the likes of nanoleaf matter bulbs, can I connect those directly to the matter integration in HA or do I need to do something in the middle.
You only need an external antenna or border router if you are getting Matter over Thread devices, those that are Matter over WiFi will connect to your HA instance once connected to your WiFi and paired using the code that comes with it via the companion app and you have the Matter integration installed.
The setup process is the same for both versions.
For repeaters aka routers to increase mesh signal strength you just invest in smart power plugs, power sockets or light switches where you have a neutral for it for the type of setup you are going for and what’s available at the time. (light switches without a neutral will only act as a endpoint device and not a routing device in the mesh)
Brand only matters for consistency sake most of the time and you want to stay away from Tuya Wifi based devices as they require a cloud based setup to work correctly, they are a pain to bother with for out of box local only setup majority of the time, the Tuya Zigbee devices are the ones that work locally without their eco system.
When it comes to hubs the only thing that matters is what devices you are wanting to setup and what you need to get them connected, i.e in my case I setup a Switchbot Hub 2 in my setup to convert my Switchbot bots from bluetooth connection to use the Matter passthrough via the hub to my HA instance for more consistent setup and management due to issues with the bluetooth adapters I was using at the time giving me headaches and dying.
I currently use zigbee through a skyconnect and have setup a GL-S200 for Thread based devices (has the option to pair bluetooth devices through it as well which is a bonus down the line) due to recent issues with multipan mode for the skyconnect (if you have more than one skyconnect you can dedicate one to zigbee and the other to thread just to keep things stable or in your setup you’d have the sonoff for your zigbee network and a skyconnect for thread for example).
I’ve ended up going the matter + philips hue route as they are both accessible here. Just discovered there’s LG matter tv’s today hah. But yeah, hue plugs & lights for zigbee networking and matter stuffs. Least I can get cheap zigbee buttons and such that my tapo/matter doesn’t support in HA.
Keep in mind with zigbee you may want to use zigbee2mqtt instead of ZHA as the former does handle device updates properly at this time, people need to make sure that the maintainers of ZHA fix this as we found out a few days ago when I was posting about the updates for my hue bulbs and led strip as I use ZHA at this time and I am too lazy to just rebuild it all to migrate since its all working otherwise without issues lol.