After seeing the livestream I have some basic questions.
If I understand correctly, Matter is a protocol that works over IP; and Thread and WiFi are just IP networks. So, if I have a Thread network I would expect that I could “ping” my thread devices from my laptop which could be connected over WiFi or via ethernet.
My question then is, could a matter device be connected via ethernet?
Moreover, I understood that Bluetooth was only necessary to join the IP network (not Matter per se). Would an ethernet Matter device not require Bluetooth as it could join the IP network without credentials, just by plugging the cable?
Finally, once the device has joined the network, does the Matter protocol not require further authentication? Is it automatically detected and adopted by Matter hosts already in the IP network?
I’m learning Matter like most of us, so I can’t claim to be an expert, but I believe I can answer your questions.
The Thread network does not share the same IP space as the WiFi/Ethernet networks and the Matter/Thread router is not set to bridge anything between networks other than the Matter protocol, so things like ICMP traffic from Ethernet to Thread is not possible at this time.
Since Matter is IP based, in theory a wired ethernet conneciton would work the same as a WiFi connection. Other than some Matter bridges, I’m not aware of anything with a physical connection that’s Matter certified today.
Bluetooth is used in the “commissioning” process to set up the WiFi or Thread connection, passing credentials, etc. Once it is attached to a network, it also passes the security keys to the device for authenticating to the Matter bridge/router. For that reason, there still has to be some connectivity even if on a hard-wired network.
Matter is encrypted by design. As part of the “commissioning” process over Bluetooth, the device and the bridge/router exchange “keys” for authenticating that secure connection. This is unlike ZWave or Zigbee, where the gateway can detect new devices and auto provision them. For that reason, new devices will not just be detected by bridge/router.
Thank you! Your answers make total sense. I was awfully unaware that Thread only allow Matter communication to the rest of the network, that is interesting to know.
i’ve seen “Matter over zigbee” devices. I suppose it actually is a zigbee device that has to be connected to a zigbee bridge (that supports matter, like Hue bridge?).
The low-power radio version of Matter is Thread, which is uses similar radios to Zigbee but are different.
Zigbee and Thread both use IEEE 802.15.4 (hence Skyconnect dual-stacking). Thread uses IPv6 addressing and supports multiple routers, both unlike Zigbee so they are incompatible.
Personally, I’d avoid, and look for the controlled certification logos which suggest the manufacturer knows what they are talking about!
Here is a thread device from the _matter._tcp. mdns records
(I know it’s a thread device because other stuff on the actual network including the Google hubs and the Switchbot mini hub have public ipv6 addresses)
You can see there is an initial high latency as the thread border router does it’s thing, and then the latency drops off a bit, but is still much higher than pinging a device on the LAN.
It was mentioned. I think the answer was basically that they currently are focusing on integrating Matter devices. Making Home Assistant act as a bridge is currently not in scope for the Matter work.
A bit of a ‘Rube Goldberg’ path, however I think you could use Tasmota’s esp32 based ‘bridge’ functions to expose something from Home Assistant that Tasmota could get at via a API call or MQTT, see link below. At least for a interim, path. Easy to setup basic bridge function and explore the Matter ‘connections’ and control between the various hub systems.
I’ve not done this yet, however I have exposed some Open Beken x-Tuya devices and ESPxx devices to Google Home and Apple HomeKit via this ‘Matter Birdge’ function of Tasmota32, I am very impressed by the function and stability of this code (at least on the Tasmota side, the changes going on with Matter stuff by the ‘big three’ not so much).
Probably because my ISP doesn’t do IPv6 yet (and thus I don’t have any IPv6 on my internal network yet), so I have no visibility to the Matter over thread devices (since they are native IPv6) from my IPv4 networks.
The new update for Matter did not fix the ability to set transition times. They are still turning on instantly. Was this expected to work in this update or a later one?
Because the Matter server requires a whole bunch os OS-level patches. Even running it yourself in a docker container can cause issues. There is only like 2% of users running HA without docker or HAOS so I think you can do the math why this has no focus. We have been tweaking the Home Assistant OS to give the best performance and meet all requirements. I suggest you fire up a VM and run Home Assistant in there if you want to use Matter or any other component that relies on external components.
Yeah, it was too big for a quick bugfix as its actually a new feature. So it will (hopefully) be in the next HA version (so the february release). The issues with setting colors did make it to the bugfix release though
There was a ton of great information and lot of slides in this 2.5 hr video, would be nice to be able to access them directly instead of scrubbing the video…
Thread can run local ip6 over your network without any requirement for ip6 support from your ISP.
Known as link.local
Any thread border tourer will handle this for you and actually the simpler/flatter network you have the easier and better it works.
If my Thread Border Router (in this case HA) is doing that, that’s fine (I know Matter is IPv6 native). I don’t have my Internet router giving out IPv6 addresses since the ISP is not currently giving it IPv6, and I would have to run a wireshark trace to see if there’s IPv6 traffic on my IoT VLAN. Point being other than the HA itself, I don’t have any other non Matter devices with an IPv6 address to test communication between thread and WiFi devices.
I would like to know what these are. Where can I find documentation or code regarding these patches? It can’t be that hard for me or any other sysadmin to spin a separate server running on the same machine as Home Assistant Core, can it be?
As for using HAOS, out of the question for me. I have close to 35 VMs and none of them can just run random arbitrary OS — it has to run as a process within a Fedora template with customizations because I’m using Qubes OS, within which I simply cannot install HAOS and run it as it’s meant to run.
I hope at some point there is an independent release of the Matter server code just as there is an independent release of Zigbee2MQTT and many other components that run parallel to HA (I’m thinking like Node-RED since that’s one of the things I use).
