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?!
That’s nice to hear, especially the bit about never having to touch the manufacturer app! I never looked that much into Matter and was just trying to read up on it now. So I guess it’s an IP based protocol, but can work over multiple types of RF media? Like WiFi and Ethernet but also Bluetooth? And then I saw also on Thread, which opens up another can of worms for me.
I guess I gotta learn some more, it would be nice to not be limited to just zwave for having a consistent protocol across my devices (a choice I made without having as much knowledge years ago)
You really want Thread over Matter when you can. Thread is the low power 2.4Ghz protocol, and is my bet for future tech. Matter makes it compatible with any ecosystem. (Functionality may be limited compared to the vendor app.)
But I already have some Z-Wave in my walls, so it’s not completely out of the question.
The vendors, of course, have been slow to roll out actually open tech. I did just get the Aqara U300 door lock, which at least can unlock through Matter.
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.
Matter over Thread, Thread being the network protocol instead of WiFi for better reliability (mesh network, self healing, etc.)
