First off, I don’t yet have any Thread devices, but my interest in this has been piqued by the announcement of Ikea’s new goodies which will.
I also don’t have a Thread radio attached to my HA hardware. However, I do have an Apple TV 4K which does, and the Thread integration in HA is showing it as an available border router, which I’m guessing is because it also advertises it’s presence over Wifi.
My question therefore is, if I add a Thread device to my Apple TV, will it then be addable to HA?
Apple TV works great as a Thread Border Router for Home Assistant. Since Thread is a network connectivity protocol (and not a Smart Home control protocol), it’s more analogous to WiFi than to Zigbee — you don’t “add a Thread device to the TV,” you just give it the credentials to join the network, and the router just routes packets back and forth between subnets.
When using Apple Thread mesh, you have a choice of two ways to add (“commission”) new Matter devices: (a) use the Apple Home app to first commission to the Apple Matter fabric, and then obtain a code to also add to HA; or (b) share the Apple credentials with HA, so you can use the HA companion app to commission directly to HA Matter fabric. The end result of both is the same, and for many people method (a) works better.
Hi @peterxian
Thanks for that reply, although I’m still none the wiser.
My HA itself doesn’t have a Thread radio, so will the devices still be added to HA (shared, I assume, over Wifi by the Apple TV?)
What @peterxian is saying is that, yes, you can add thread devices to your HA.
Think of the TV as an intermediary between HA and the thread network. The TV is the thread network’s ‘conductor’ and speaks on behalf of the thread network with HA.
So, you don’t add thread devices to the TV per se, you add it directly to HA (using the TV as a gateway/hub aka border router to invisibly communicate).