Hey folks , I came across this video today https://youtu.be/06zzl7o_IqQ?si=V1n8YiqIdR1buPX_
And maybe I’m stupid but , I don’t get the point of this video / the add on talked about . You can absolutely add , zigbee matter and other types of devices to HA and just make automations that make them work right? So what’s the point of making your non matter devices "act like matter devices " ?
so you can export ha zigbee etc device(s) to homekit or other.
Haven’t tried it myself, but from what I read here, it’s the least painful way of exposing devices to Alexa too.
You can make your non Matter devices into virtual Matter devices and if you have a Google or Alexa Matter hub in that Matter fabric, then you have actually shared your devices with those ecosystems without the need to open ports in your router/firewall.
That means you can get Google Assistant or Alexa to work in a mor secure way or even make it work if you are behind CGNAT, where opening ports in your router is not possible.
I use it for the reason others have mentioned: simplified integration with Amazon Alexa.
I have dozens of devices (lights, switches, covers, locks, thermostat, etc) that are integrated with Home Assistant. I have a third generation Amazon Echo Dot and it can discover and control Matter devices. I use Matter Hub to make the ‘dozens of devices’ Matter-compatible so they become voice-controllable via the Echo.
If you’re familiar with the Emulated Hue integration, it can make devices in Home Assistant appear to be Philips Hue lights. An Amazon Echo can discover and control Hue lights. The limitation is that the device is understood to be exclusively a light (regardless if the device is actually a switch or lock or etc). The advantage of Matter Hub is that the device’s type is retained (i.e. whatever is supported by Matter, such as light, switch, thermostat, lock, etc).
The traditional way of making Home Assistant’s devices controllable via Alexa requires you to expose your Home Assistant server to the internet to make it accessible to Amazon’s Alexa service (that’s the route it uses to access the devices). You don’t need to do that if you use Emulated Hue or Matter Hub.
FWIW, in the past I used Node-Red’s equivalent of the Emulated Hue integration. I created flows in Node-Red to control the behavior of voice commands for devices that were not actually lights. For example, it would ignore a brightness command (or color command) for a switch. For a thermostat, it interpreted brightness commands as a temperature setting (ignoring any values that were not in range of typical temperature values). However, I have abandoned all of that in favor of using Matter Hub.
I see a number of online guides which mention emulated hue but not the matter bridge method. Is the matter bridge method quite new, and so perhaps the reason for this?
Have you ever used the home assistant cloud (nabu kasa subscription) method of exposing HA devices to Alexa. If yes, how do you find matter bridge method in comparison?
Matter is quite new and multi admin mode have first recently been made stricter in the protocol,vaobit now actually works somewhat consistently across different vendors hubs.
The Home Assistant Matter Hub project is just over a year old now whereas the Emulated Hue integration is several years old. That may explain why you have seen more written about Emulated Hue than Matter Hub.
Home Assistant Cloud works on the traditional principle of making your Home Assistant server accessible via the internet so it can be accessed directly by Amazon’s Alexa service (i.e. which runs on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure).
Matter Hub doesn’t require exposing your server to the internet. Your Amazon Alexa device (late model versions of Echo or Echo Dot) communicates directly with Matter devices visible to it on your local network (similarly to Emulated Hue).
Given a choice, I prefer to “Alexa-enable” my devices locally. Response times are very fast (i.e. a light turns on/off well before Alexa responds “OK” to the command).
Didn’t realise it was that new. I’m sure that explains it.
Regarding Alexa voice control of Matter devices - does this happen entirely locally? I’ve been under the impression that Alexa voice always requires internet access, which led me to believe that if the goal is Alexa voice control it doesn’t matter much if HA devices are shared to Alexa locally or over internet: if internet is down, voice control would be lost anyway.
With Matter multiple ecosystem can control the same devices.
If HA and Alexa is using Matter and they are joined in the same Matter fabric, then they can see and control the same things.
Alexa does not communicate with HA, but directly with the devices, and same for HA.
Whenever one ecosystem request a change, then the device will report that the change have happened and all the ecosystems will then register that.
This all happens locally.
Obviously there will be no Alexa service if internet access is unavailable.
You asked for:
what’s the point of making your non matter devices "act like matter devices " ?
My answer is to Alexa-enable them without making your Home Assistant server accessible from the internet. Amazon’s Alexa service talks to the Matter devices via your local Echo as opposed to via an internet-facing Home Assistant server.
I overlooked to mention that a late model Amazon Echo or Echo Dot is able to automatically, and immediately, discover newly added Matter devices. When I used Emulated Hue, I had to explicitly request discovery and the new device was not found instantaneously.
No I didn’t. I’m trying to understand if there is a benefit of device sharing via Matter over device sharing via internet if the end goal is to use an internet-dependent service such as Alexa voice control. In this specific scenario a principle benefit of local sharing (ability to use when internet is down) is moot.
One benefit is cost (internet sharing likely requires a subscription fee) but that might also be moot if there are other reasons for having the subscription (as may be the case with a Home Assistant Cloud subscription). But I gather you would argue the benefit would be to avoid/minimise exposing your HA machine to the internet.
Ok, you didn’t and it was someone else.
Nevertheless the point remains the same. It offers increased security.
Plus the advantages mentioned by others.
If you feel none of what has been mentioned is useful to you then, I agree with you, Matter is “moot” for you.
For myself, it’s an improved way of Alexa-enabling my devices.
hello,
just came accross this and since the matter hub has gone EOL, i’m moving to matter bridge.
Is still this a doable alternative? the use case is exactly what was written above: expose devices to alexa without exposing ha to AWS (and it’s what i’m doing today with matter hum). But as soon as i installed the bridge i faced the first issue: i added a “Matter” label to all the devices exposed through the matter hub, so i set up the bridge in the same way. Result: it sees just a subset of tagged devices. Is there anything i can debug on this? (some climates yes, some climates no. It seems to have no scheme)
Thanks
FWIW, I originally tried MatterBridge and encountered similar problems to what you experienced. I was recommended to try Matter Hub and it was far easier to configure (and it worked properly and reliably).
Yes, it’s disappointing that the author of Matter Hub was unable to find a replacement maintainer and so the project will no longer be maintained. Nevertheless, I will continue to use version 3.03 (the final version, 3.04, has a bug; fails to work with climate entities) until I am obliged to find a good substitute.
From what a can tell, MatterBridge requires a Device (at least when using the Label filter). With MatterHub, entities without a device were able to be labelled with the same label and would show up in MatterHub.
I tried selecting the option to filter entities by labels as well, but it just reduced the entities listed, as it then requires the label on BOTH device and entity. The entities without devices still didn’t show up.
yep, found out yesterday evening. In my case, i had some one-entities-devices where i tagged just the entity. Still not tried to expose the hub to alexa. let’s see if it works…
Exactly, and that’s a significant drawback for use with my system.
FWIW, the documentation leads one to believe you can successfully label entities exclusively (i.e. not associated with a device). Yet it doesn’t behave that way.
It is possible to filter entities and devices by Label.
FYI, I came across a posting a day or two ago about a forked version that is being maintained:
Thanks!
I am impressed by the quantity of Issues the author of the forked repo has closed in the span of just 3 days.
The improvements are significant and the current alpha version (2.0) contains a feature I will definitely use: entity name customization (a.k.a. aliases).
The migration instructions are straightforward. I will make the switch when version 2.0 is released.