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My entire “smart” home setup is built with Matter over Thread. It’s fully local. No internet access required. With Home Assistant onboarding can be done without

My entire “smart” home setup is built with Matter over Thread. It’s fully local. No internet access required. With Home Assistant onboarding can be done without a smartphone now. Devices without official certification work but probably only in Home Assistant.

iamacyborg 2mo ago
My Matter over Thread stuff keeps occasionally falling over in Home Assistant and becoming unavailable, probably a router issue as I’m using a homepod mini but still endlessly frustrating.
- wao0uuno 2mo ago
  I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.
  - iamacyborg 2mo ago
    My whole setup is, suboptimal, to put it delicately. It’s just running on a NUC that’s crammed inside my AV cabinet, antennas would be crammed in there as well. I mostly buy zigbee stuff but it’s hard to ignore how cheap the Ikea Matter over Thread kit is.
torginus 2mo ago
Dunno, personally I have found HA + MoT to be strictly worse than Z2M. It's the classic case of the Douglas Adams quote: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices. I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.
- wao0uuno 2mo ago
  I never had any problems with Thread that couldn’t be fixed by pulling batteries from a crashed Ikea device and I have very little interest in how the protocol works. Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children. Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.

iamacyborg 2mo ago

My Matter over Thread stuff keeps occasionally falling over in Home Assistant and becoming unavailable, probably a router issue as I’m using a homepod mini but still endlessly frustrating.

wao0uuno 2mo ago
I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.
- iamacyborg 2mo ago
  My whole setup is, suboptimal, to put it delicately. It’s just running on a NUC that’s crammed inside my AV cabinet, antennas would be crammed in there as well. I mostly buy zigbee stuff but it’s hard to ignore how cheap the Ikea Matter over Thread kit is.

torginus 2mo ago

Dunno, personally I have found HA + MoT to be strictly worse than Z2M. It's the classic case of the Douglas Adams quote: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices. I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.

wao0uuno 2mo ago
I never had any problems with Thread that couldn’t be fixed by pulling batteries from a crashed Ikea device and I have very little interest in how the protocol works. Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children. Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.