The State of Matter

Still lot of work. Once you joined the ha thread border router, you can’t join other tbr’s.
No network map, no idea of the strength of the connections, …I hope more people will work on matter. The three devices I have for the moment work good. But I don’t want to add too many matter/thread devices yet, for now.

I know that Matter isn’t just Thread. But having converted my Homekit setup to Home Assistant, many of my devices are Thread. So I’m hoping for continued focus on Thread: increasing stability by adding additional OTBR (until recently this decreased stability, not sure if I’ll notice when that bug has been resolved?) and displaying network topology and strength. Compared to the feature set of zigbee2mqtt Thread is still very, very basic.

Well, guess I’ll not be using Matter :frowning_face: With this as a requirement, there will be no way to know if any particular device will even commission (let alone continue to function normally) without access to the internet, so you can’t simply block internet access on your devices network for privacy. This is truly sad. Please tell me I’m wrong.

Edit: The weakly worded and deflecting privacy statement in the Matter FAQ should have been a warning sign: Matter FAQs | Frequently Asked Questions - CSA-IOT
Oh well :man_shrugging:

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Just so I’m clear, multiprotocol SkyConnect firmware for will no longer be updated and improved? Therefore, if I want to get regular skyconnect firmware updates, will I need two separate Skyconnects, one for ZIgbee and the other for Thread?

I didn’t read it as a support issue, I would actually read it as: ‘If you want functional Zigbee and Matter over Thread networks right now you will have them on separate coordinators, and no there’s no ETA because there’s other priorities.’

The words “…will remain experimental” is what’s bothering me. If they plan to eventually restart multiprotocol development, it is very unclear.

While it can be done for free, you could support Home Assistant development by subscribing to Nabu Casa which gives you all the above without any hassle. Monthly/yearly cost is low and totally worth it.

It’s open source, anyone could pick up and roll with it. But I wouldn’t read experimental as anything to hang any hopes on.

Yes, it’s open source, but Skyconnect wasn’t free. So I was kinda expecting it to work. lol

That said, I understand that multiprotocol is new to the home automation market. Plus it was taking a risk expecting Matter protocol to be more formalized by now.

However, I do like that Nabu is trying things and not being afraid to fail (how many colors of HA hub before they get it right). But that is also part of the fun of using this platform. It leads ahead of most other proprietary platforms.

Skyconnect: the promise of ZigBee AND matter(thread)
Glad I didn’t buy it. Never buy a promise

The promises of Silicon Labs, who can’t produce stable firmware. Also see the problems with the Z-Wave 700 chipset.

I just read this post. The thing that caught my eye was the note about no VLANs. It seems to me that VLANs are not enterprise, they are a good practice. Putting all my IoT devices on their own VLAN with its own routing/firewall rules just makes sense. Will matter support this? As of now, I have all IoT devices on one VLAN, all non IoT / non server devices on one VLAN, and all servers (such as Home Assistant) on another VLAN. I can imagine changing this. I would also expect that consumer router manufacturers may adopt it, at least for IoT. Will Matter work with this in the future?

No it won’t - this relies on L2 networking only due to things like neighbour discovery etc. If you want to use a IoT vLAN, just put the HA server (and any border routers you may have) in that lan.

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It was never a promise.

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To reply to @marcelveldt : Deploying more than one Zigbee2MQTT instance may not be as rare as you think. I’ve seen multiple reports online of people implementing more than one Zignee2MQTT instance. I had to do the same: my house is multi-story built of steel-inforced concrete. This not only forced me to deploy a WiFi router on each floor, but the only way to create a stable zigbee setup was to deploy multiple zigbee2mqtt instances as well. They run as a docker instance on RPi zero 2W which I connected over WiFi to the MQTT broker running on my (ground-floor) raspberry pi, running debian 12 and HA. I opted for the debian 12 and not the HAOS install because I could install more debugging and tracing tools.

Happy to support Nabu Casa.
I have a HA Green and a SkyConnect from them.

However I do not wish to rely on something outside my ability to confirgure for my home automation - part of the reason for chosing HA in the first place.

Assuming using another stick, can I use two SkyConnect devices one for Zigbee and one for Matter?

Yes you can.

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Wow! This is very bad. I’ve read the link and it seems very clear: from Thread 1.4.0, devices will have the assurance that they have internet connection.
I have to say I’m specially lucky, because when I started with HA 1.5 years ago, Matter support was a bit inmature and I chose to go for ZigBee… but what if I hadn’t?

+1 here!

I think this breaks a lot of things for HA supporting Matter as before. One of the Open Home Foundation values is “Local control of your data”, “Only share what you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want”. This is broken with Thread - and therefore, Matter.

I guess it’s really okay if HA supports Matter, as well as Google and Amazon, it gives HA users flexibility. I think the issue is that HA has put Thread at the same level as ZigBee, Z-Wave and Bluetooth, and now this is no longer the case.

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Hm. “to provide a standardized path to the Internet” suggests that an Internet connection must be possible. It does not indicate a requirement for a constant or mandatory Internet connection but rather implies that the infrastructure (Thread Border Router) should be in place to enable this connection when needed.

Or am I getting this wrong?

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