Newly migrated to Home Assistant with Matter/Thread issues

Configuration Matter/Thread
1

I recently moved from SmartThings to Home Assistant (wish I had done this a long time ago). Everything has been great except my Thread/Matter integration. I had the same devices running on SmartThings with no issues. But in Home Assistant I have nothing but issues.

First of all, I had to migrate my network to Home Assistant’s Open Thread Border Router, which was an adventure all its own that included me having to clear app data on my phone. I eventually got it working, but I had issues immediately with very slow response times. I have a switch setup to control 2 Zigbee lights and 4 Matter lights. When I hit the switch, the Zigbee lights responded instantly. The Matter lights however take their sweet time. Sometimes like 30 seconds to a minute to either turn on or off. Some will turn on faster and others come later. When these same lights were connected to SmartTthings I never had an issue. There was a tiny extra delay compared to Zigbee, but not enough that I ever thought about it.

Now, after they have been hooked up for a couple weeks and I’ve just been dealing with the slowness, they have started disconnecting entirely. All 4 Matter lights went to unavailable. I tried reloading all the related integrations and add ons. I restarted Home Assistant. I power cycled the lights. Nothing got the lights to connect back to the network. Eventually 2 of the lights got reconnected but the other two are still unavailable. Even the 2 that reconnected go in and out of availability.

I have a Home Assistant Green with Open Thread Border Router installed with the standard Thread and Matter integrations. All my software is fully up to date. I have a ZBT-1 running the radio with the latest firmware. My stick is connected to a powered USB 2.0 hub that is as far away from my Wi-Fi as I can get it. The stick is in the same location as my Zigbee and zwave radios and I am not having issues with either of those. The Home Assistant is in the same location that my SmartThings hub was.

One more thing to mention is, while I was transitioning to Home Assistant, I had these lights still connected to the SmartThings border router and hooked into Home Assistant through Matter. I did not have these issues until I hooked them up to the Open Thread Border Router on Home Assistant.

Does the Open Thread Border Router just not work well in Home Assistant? I’d prefer to not have to swap out my Nano Leaf lights as I like them a lot. But I’m not sure I can deal with just not being able to use these lights at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can fix this?

2

The underlying OTBR software is good, and is used by several commercial border routers (I heard that Eero uses OTBR in fact). The HA UX for Thread setup is still lacking, but it’s not entirely their fault; the Thread protocol in general is missing some interoperability features and is fairly new on the scene, so UX will take time to improve. Notably it is one of the few (only?) TBRs that let you import a credentials dataset so, in theory, you could have just added it to your old mesh and then turned off SmartThings without re-commissioning anything.

The ZBT-1, on the other hand, has had a number of problems. And while I haven’t seen delays like yours with Thread, I have seen them with Z-wave almost always due to mesh/signal strength issues, so perhaps moving your usb hub closer to your lights, or adding a repeater in the space between them, could improve things. You can even make a repeater yourself for about $5. Alternatively, unless your goal is to get rid of the SmartThings device, you could also still use it as a “dumb” TBR. Remember: functionally, Thread is more analogous to WiFi than to ZIgbee — Thread Border Routers are just network devices that move packets between subnets, they don’t do any of the “smart” control.

3

It’s amazing, I have moved the antenna about 1 foot closer to the lights and everything has become stable (at least for now). The lights are staying connected and while there is still a small delay turning some lights on sometimes, it’s nothing like it was before. Overall now, this makes the ZBT-1 antenna about 3 total feet closer to the lights than my SmartThings Hub was.

I can’t get the antenna much closer with my current setup and cannot place a repeater between them. I could move the hub entirely to a spot that would be closer, but the setup is my hub is in a room upstairs and the lights are in an adjacent room in the ceiling of a downstairs room. The closest light is probably about 10 feet away from the antenna now.

One thing about the current delay that seems strange to me is, I often see 1 or 2 lights turn on very quickly and then the last 1 or 2 have a few seconds of delay before they turn on. Usually, they all turn off pretty quick. But if they are in a mesh and the first light gets the signal, why would there be such a delay in the others responding?

I’m amazed that 1 foot is the difference between can’t connect at all and connects perfectly fine. I do have thick plaster and lath walls, but still.