Let’s say you want to use an “Eve Energy Outlet – Smart Outlet & Power Meter” where this Eve Energy Outlet requires a hub, the hubs mentioned are:
Apple Home: Apple TV 4K, HomePod, HomePod mini
Samsung SmartThings: SmartThings Hub v3, SmartThings Station
Amazon Alexa: Echo, eero 6 / 6+ / Pro 6 / Pro 6E / Max 7
Google Home: Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, Nest Wifi, Nest Wifi Pro
If you have ANY Thread Border Router, can you use any Matter device or home platform? Is the usage of this Thread Border Router user transparent?
So, can you have a Google Nest hub and use Apple Home…? Or use an Apple TV and use Google Home?
If you have ANY Thread Border Router, will all thread or matter devices work in HA?
Will HA Yellow allow Zigbee & Thread right out of the box?
I see where it says “Thread to power your Matter network is coming soon.” but I’m not sure if soon has arrived yet…
Now or in the near future, are we expecting HA Yellow to provide: Zigbee, Thread and Matter over Thread… full functionality? If so, then we don’t have to rely on Apple TV or Nest Hun or any other Thread Border Router hardware?
I use several Eve Energy plugs with just my HA SkyConnect, which is now also named something else and I think it is similar to the one in the Yellow box.
Hubs are sometimes required to update the firmware on the Matter devices.
It seems I need a Apple hun for updating my Onvis S4 plugs, but Eve devices are using the CSA (the organisation behind Matter) firmware download feature, so HA can handle that and that makes Eve devices extremely easy to update in HA.
Matter was intended to work like this, yes. Thread is just an IP subnet, analogous to WiFi, and just like devices don’t care what WiFi router you have, they shouldn’t care what Thread Border Router you have.
But then reality got in the way. All the major TBR manufacturers made the decision to auto-generate your Thread network name and credentials dataset (rather than let you pick, like with WiFi), and conceal it from you to keep it extra secure. And since the Thread standard had no way of vendor A sharing those credentials with vendor B, it effectively “locked in” a vendor ecosystem to whomever has access to those credentials. The result is only Apple devices can commission to Apple Thread networks, Google devices on Google Thread, Alexa app for Eero/Echo Thread, etc. Only once the commissioning is done, Thread works like a vendor-neutral IP router network.
Fortunately there are workarounds. HA can import credentials from Apple and Google using its (respective) companion apps (though Amazon is still locked down, I believe). Also Matter is “multi-admin” so you can commission a device to a vendor Matter fabric and, having placed it on the (Thread) network, add it to the HA fabric and remove from the first one. The light at the end of the tunnel is newly-released Thread 1.4 spec that finally defines a standard method of credential sharing, which (hopefully!) will be adopted within the next few years and this will all finally work as originally intended.
The Matter 1.5 is said to be focused a lot on multi-admin standards and features, so half an year to the release of the version and then half an year to an year for the vendors to implement it.
Generally if you want anything that is not limited to the hub options that are from Apple, Google and Amazon then you are looking at coordinators like the Skyconnect that can be put in thread mode or devices like the GL-200 from GL iNet.
There may be more options out there later as the thread protocol matures, but for now these are the ones that I have seen and I have the latter for retesting as things change.
When it come to matter there are two versions one is wifi based the other is thread based, the former does not need any border router to be supported on the smart home setup as all it needs is to have the matter server on the network (in our case this is hosted in our HA instance using the Matter (beta) intergration).
I suggest if you are looking at matter capable devices stick to matter over wifi for the ease of overall setup and management in the long term.