Home Assistant and Matter/Thread

Home Automation and Networking

A while back I made the move from HomeSeer to Home Assistant for my home automation platform.  Home Assistant has come a long way, and I think has a much more polished management interface, and overall, much more flexibility.  On top of that, it’s an open-source project, so no more license renewals.

Recently I thought it would be a great idea to add Matter/Thread support to my installation, and the ZBT-2 antenna seemed like the way to go.  So I ordered one, and since then, it hasn’t been as smooth of a journey as I had hoped.

What really helped was leveraging Copilot to help put together a configuration checklist after providing info about my network and Home Assistant hardware, and then through a few refinements of my prompts, I was able to finally get my first Matter devices added.

The checklist ended up with 4 phases, each with a number of steps:

  1.  Router configuration (some of these settings might be specific to my hardware)
    • Make sure mDNS us enabled
    • Enable IPv6 router advertisement
    • Enable Multicast enhancement
    • Turn off Multicast and Broadcast Control
    • Turn on IGMP Snooping
  2. ZBT-2 hardware and firmware setup
    • Connect ZBT-2 to a USB 2.0 extension cable, into a powered USB hub
    • Flash hardware with the Thread-only firmware
    • Configure OTBR, ensuring NAT64 and OTBR Firewall are both ON.
  3. Home Assistant network configuration
    • Enable IPv6 in HAOS Go to Settings > System > Network. Set IPv6 to Automatic.
    • Set Preferred Thread Network: Go to Settings > Devices & Services > Thread. Click the ZBT-2 network and select “Set as Preferred”.
    • Restart HAOS: Perform a Full System Reboot (not just a Quick Reload) to initialize the new firmware and network routes.
  4. Mobile & Commissioning setup.  Your mobile device acts as the ‘commissioner’ to pass credentials to the ZBT-2
    • Connect your phone to the same WiFi: Ensure your phone is on the same SSID and VLAN as the Home Assistant instance. I was pairing some light bulbs that only supported 2.4GHz wifi, so I also disabled the 5 and 6 GHz bands on my closest access point, and made sure my phone was bound to it.
    • Sync Thread Credentials: In the HA Mobile App, go to Settings > Companion App > Troubleshooting > Sync Thread Credentials.
    • Pair via Matter Flow: In HA, go to Add Integration > Matter and scan the device QR code.

This worked for me – hopefully it helps anyone else out there having challenges with Matter/Thread in Home Assistant!