I’ve used Home Assistant for a long time, but this has been my first disastrous foray into Matter/Thread. The bottom line is that I’m unable to do any Matter/Thread pairing with my Aqara lock, and I can’t pin down if it’s network segmentation issues, credential sharing issues, or the lock being only amenable to its own hub.
It started with the Aqara U400 lock. It looked promising, but upon getting it, I realized that the only apparent way to get it setup was to use the Aqara hub. On getting the M200 hub, I decided I didn’t like the way that integration worked (and having another hub for my pile of hubs), and went back to the drawing board, determined to make the lock with with HA natively.
I started with my ZBT-2, flashed with Thread firmware upon plugging it in to my Home Assistant Yellow (whose built-in radio is doing Zigbee (more on that later). I then added Matter and Thread, and configured them. It took me awhile to figure out what all the “Send to ” buttons were about, and it seemed like in my situation, sending credentials to my iphone was what was wanted. Once Thread was all setup, I went about trying to add my device. At first, I saw no log messages, but after many hours of trial and error, with amazing messages like “Home couldn’t connect to this accessory”. “Thread border router required”, and mostly just timeouts as I installed/uninstalled Thread and matter several dozen times.
1-Channel conflict with Zigbee. This seemed likely, as both are using channel 15. But my efforts to change this through the HA interface failed silently without any log messages, and I could not find another way to do this via command line. So I had to give up on this.
2-Some sort of credential issue. The interface is incredibly obscure on this issue, but in the end, I was able to dig into what credentials for Thread the companion app had stored, and confirmed they were the same ones as in the Thread configuration. There could be a lot more I’m missing here, but I’ll just say I tried every permutation of sharing credentials, recreating everything,etc.
3-Phone and HA on different Subnets. I run a Ubiquiti-based network and my HA instance is on one subnet of a /24 network, while my phone (via Wifi) is on another. I ran into directions for maybe addressing this at https://niksa.dev/posts/ha-vlan/, and so added HA to the network with my phone on it. This didn’t appear to do anything, but seeing some errors like the following put me onto the last thread I followed…
4-Something crazy with ipv6. I have only the slightest grasp of ipv6, and I’ve never actively used it for anything until realizing it’s what Thread is using under the hood, but I started seeing errors like this:
Default: mDNSPlatformSendUDP got error 99 (Cannot assign requested address) sending packet to ff02::fb on interface fe80::819e:2c0:4e5:2605/end0.10/18
Default: mDNSPlatformSendUDP got error 99 (Cannot assign requested address) sending packet to ff02::fb on interface fe80::e4c0:4ff:fedf:6645/veth8031826/20
I checked my network to ensure ipv6 was enabled, mdns forwarding was enabled, etc. I tried a few more things, but between the 10-minute timeouts on adding devices and cyptic log entries, I’m completely stuck. I may well have backed myself into a corner with the multi-homed configuration where mdns is just behaving poorly. But without some documentation on what sort of network configurations HA will support with Matter/Thread, I can’t even guess.
I think my next step on the network front is going to be getting my phone in the same subnet as HA and see what happens then. But based on my attempts to manually enroll the lock in HA directly with the code, I’m skeptical this will change anything.
And I’m not ruling out the fact that maybe the Aqara gear simply needs its own hub to operate with Matter/Thread at all. In my initial setup attempts, the lock would do nothing without its hub present, though I thought I’d avoid that by factory resetting and immediately trying to pair with HA.
My situation is probably a bit odd due to my network configuration, but I can’t even find anyone who has Aqara Matter/Thread gear pairing directly to HA without the hub – in any configuration. Does anyone have suggestions for how to proceed?
