I spent a couple days trying to figure it out, and I think I’ve got it working now…
I’ll document this here, in case I need to do it again someday, and to save other’s the hassle of trying to figure out how to do this.
I have a remote accessory building on my property that I wanted to extend my Z=wave, Zigbee and Thread networks to.
The primary HA instance has a ZWA-2 for Z-wave and an SLZB-MR4U for Thread and Zigbee.
I purchased an SLZB-Ultima3 for those networks at my remote building.
Both HA instances are on Proxmox and on the same network. The two buildings are connected via a reliable fiber network between them.
Setting up the second Z-Wave and and Zigbee networks was pretty straight forward…Just install the Apps and Integrations, connect them to the Ultima3 and away they went.
Matter/Thread— Not so easy. The hard part, is that today’s IOS and Android implementations apparently only allow for a single Matter/Thread credential store at a time.
This meant I would have to keep dumping and reloading credentials between the two HA instances which initially had seperate Thread networks. (note: This also means helping family with their Matter/Thread provisioning issues would be difficult as well…Hopefully this get’s cleaned up in the future…)
So how to make it work?
Get your TLV string from your first HA instance:
Go to Thread integration
Click on the Gear icon
Click on the circle I of the network you want to extend
Copy the TLV string
Go to your second HA instance:
Setup your SLZB to connect to your OTBR on this instance. Install Thread integration, etc.
Open a terminal session (be sure your terminal session allows Protection mode)
run: docker exec -it app_core_openthread_border_router ot-ctl dataset set active "TLV string"
docker exec -it app_core_openthread_border_router ot-ctl ifconfig up
docker exec -it app_core_openthread_border_router ot-ctl thread start
Then I went to my Thread integration and!
Both OTBR on the same network!
I have both SLZB devices sitting next to me on the table, and when I added a device on the secondary HA instance, it seemed to add it to the SLZB coordinator on the primary HA instance.
When I powered off the primary SLZB coordinator, all my thread devices seemed to fail over to the secondary SLZB coordinator.
I’ve only been playing with this for a couple hours, but it all seems to work great. I assume when I seperate my SLZB devices, that provisioning a new device will just go to the coordinator it can reach.
Open to suggestions on if there’s a better way to do this.