Disclaimer: I am new to thread, apologies in advance for some very trivial questions.
In my head, my two Shelly 2pm gen4 (Wi-Fi and Thread capable) were going to be thread “routers” while Home Assistant was going to the “Border Router”.
Now in Home Assistant, under the Matter Integration, I see both shelly devices listed, but it clearly states they are connected over my home wifi network.
My plan was to add thread endpoints (battery powered smoke detectors for example), they would connect to the thread routers (the shellys) which would route the traffic to the home assistant (border router).
Am I missing something, did I make a mistake when I added the shelly to my thread network (I used the home assistant companion app and the matter integration)?
Maybe the mistake was that these shellys were already integrated over wifi with Home Assistant’s Shelly integration before I added them to the Matter integration?
There was a possible conversion from zigbee to matter firmware in the GUI of the Shelly and I made the following hasty deduction: "well if it can Zigbee, which is based on IEEE 802.15.4, and there’s a firmware conversion to do Matter required, clearly it is going to be Thread, since it’s also based on IEEE 802.15.4”
Maybe in the future, it seems that everything is available in the 2pm gen4 for thread, from a hardware point of view.
I feel like Shelly has very little incentive to release a Thread firmware version, given the device does not need to conserve power and WiFi is just so much easier to work with as of today. You never know, maybe they will surprise me.
But if you really, really wanted Thread, then in theory, you could use esphome to compile your own custom firmware that uses the 802.15.4 radio on the esp32-c6 for Thread networking. But there are important caveats to be aware of:
you need to know how the Shelly is wired to the esp32-c6 in order to correctly map all the on-board functionality. Luckily someone appears to have already done the hard work, though you would need to modify that config to use Thread instead of WiFi.
esphome does NOT support the Matter protocol for control, it has its own TCP-based protocol so would only work with HA and not other ecosystems.
some Shelly devices can be converted to open firmware via over-the-air updates using an intermediary image to repartition, but I don’t see any gen4 devices on that list yet, in which case you might need a usb serial adapter and some soldering skills.
Let’s say the incentive for me is, to have more thread routers in the house so I can use battery-powered thread devices easily. I suspect it’s the very same incentive that resulted in Shelly adding Zigbee to these 2PM gen4 devices.
