homeassistant

12210 readers

54 users here now

Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

First Matter Device! (self.homeassistant)

submitted 2 weeks ago by RVAtom to c/homeassistant

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

After over a decade of seasonal use, my outdoor holiday lights controller didn't wake up when I brought it down from the attic this weekend. I knew I wanted to replace it with something that worked with Home Assistant, but wasn't sure what to go with. I have had a lot of luck lately with some Zigbee devices around the house, and I love having Home Assistant be in charge rather than some other cloud integration. However there didn't seem to be much to choose from Zigbee wise.

Somehow I ended up looking at a Matter enabled device, specifically the TP-Link - Tapo Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug with Matter. I am really pleased with how adding it to Home Assisant worked! I have the Home Assistant Yellow, so I have all of the hardware needed for that. Once I realized I needed my phone on the 2.4 GHz WiFi to provision the TP-Link device, it was smooth as it could be. I never installed a TP-Link app, nor created an account in their cloud.

The Matter dream might be alive after all?!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You really want Thread over Matter

Do you mean over WiFi? Matter and Thread don't have overlapping functionality. In the OSI model, Matter is like layers 6-7, Thread covers 3-5, and 802.15.4 is 1-2 (MACPHY).

Matter also works over Ethernet and WiFi.

ZigBee is like 3-7 also using 802.15.4.

Z-Wave is also like 3-7 with some sub-GHz MACPHY.

For Matter, low power devices and sleepy devices should use Thread to optimally conserve battery.

Ethernet > WiFi unless wireless is needed for other use cases like cameras, media boxes, dedicated power, etc.

Bluetooth (low energy) last I checked is only supported for commissioning a device. It does use the Matter protocol, and I've blinked some lights on test hardware over BLE, but it wasn't officially supported.

[–] scholar 3 points 1 week ago

Matter over Thread, Thread being the network protocol instead of WiFi for better reliability (mesh network, self healing, etc.)