Episode 3 – SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 with Matter over Thread in Home Assistant

<p><strong>Episode 3 – SMLIGHT SLZB-MRW10 with Matter over Thread in Home Assistant</strong><br><strong>Channel: Tinker Tut</strong></p><p>Hello and welcome back to the channel for yet another episode on the <strong>SLZB-MRW10</strong>. In this episode, we are going to talk about the matter over thread radio in the device and its integration into Home Assistant. In previous episodes, we covered the Zigbee and Z-Wave radio modes for the MRW10. And in this video, we are going to talk about the matter over thread.</p><p>Right. So, what do we have here? We just have our <strong>MRW10</strong> device and we have a simple matter over thread plug from Onvis, the S4. And we're going to get to test that together. So, I have here my dashboard with all of the possible radio modes. I have my matter enabled. I'm going to turn it on and off. As you can see, it is very fast and very reliable. And I'm happy with the performance.</p><p>So what do we have here? We have our home lab. You have your <strong>MRW10</strong> connected over PoE. You have your radio mode on matter over thread. You have your Home Assistant running on any device you want. You have your Bluetooth. And we are going to install two add-ons, the OpenThread and Matter. And the remaining integrations will be auto-discovered. And for device commissioning we are going to use the mobile phone Android or iPhone or we are going to use the built-in or USB Bluetooth on your Home Assistant box.</p><p>Great. So the first step we want to do now is to update the firmware on the <strong>MRW10</strong> and switch it over to matter over thread if not already. So I have already the Zigbee coordinator on. So let's go to settings, firmware update and go to the chip and select matter over thread. See the Zigbee is installed. We want to change that to matter. They are mutually exclusive. And I'm going to go ahead with the stable firmware release. I also tested the dev firmware and it's working fine. It's really up to you. And now the update is done. We go to the mode and check that it is matter over thread enabled. So this is what we're looking for.</p><p>Now that the radio is on matter over thread, let's head to Home Assistant and get started with our add-ons. So the first add-on we want to install is the OpenThread add-on. So go to settings, add-ons, add-on store. Let's search for OpenThread. Okay, let's install that. Takes some time. Then let's head to configuration. Here we want to do a couple of things. Uncheck hardware flow control. Uncheck automatically flash firmware and show additional settings. Here let's add the DNS name of our device. And let's check the port is correct. So let's go back and check the port socket port of matter over thread. It's correct, default and let's save.</p><p>Now we're going to face an issue. This is a bug in the UI validation of the add-on. You really need to add any USB device and it just searches for a USB device. This is a bug. We absolutely do not need the dongle here. Rather it is again a UI validation issue on the add-on. So let's start the add-on and check the logs starting. Okay. It will take some time. Successfully started. So we are good. Okay. Now it became the leader. All right. So, so far so good with this add-on.</p><p>Now, let's head to the add-on store again and search for the Matter Server add-on. And we're going to go ahead and install that one as well. Let's head to configuration here. Again, we're going to show unused configuration. So, what we're going to do here is we're going to use the Bluetooth adapter or device on the Home Assistant box. In my case, this is a Raspberry Pi, so it has built-in Bluetooth. So, you're going to find HCI0 is your device. So, we're going to use the device ID zero. If we head back to the Matter Server and insert here zero and this is what it's going to tell the Matter Server to use the Bluetooth for discovery of your devices. Now let's start the add-on and let's head back to log again and see what's going on. It is successfully initialized and started. So these are the two add-ons we need to install and then the remaining integrations will be auto-discovered and so on.</p><p>Now to the final step commissioning the matter devices themselves. So here I'm going to start by using an iPhone. I was however unsuccessful in doing so. I'm using IPv6 enabled iOS version 18.6.2 at the time of using this video or shooting this video and I did all these steps of making the thread network my preferred network sending credentials to the phone removing any additional thread border routers and now I'm going to try to add the device add matter device and I also tried new devices by scanning for the ones that were completely factory reset. It does negotiate with the device but unfortunately it fails to pair and I believe this has something to do with the credential on the phone itself. I just could not get it to work. However, if you want to onboard it to Apple Home, for example, for this Onvis, it works pretty much straightforward. Nothing to do. You just discover it and it works fine.</p><p>So, what does work is commissioning devices using the Home Assistant Bluetooth, either via USB stick or the Raspberry Pi built-in. So here I'm going to go to thread. I'm going to check my preferred network. I'm going to copy the tag length value key and store it somewhere in notepad or copy it to clipboard. Then I'm going to head to the Matter Server and I'm going to open the web UI. I'm going to commission the node manually. Commission new thread device. I'm going to paste the data set for the thread set and then I'm going to type in the initial pairing code that is printed on the device label itself. And then I'm going to commission. By the way, I also tried adding the second pairing code from HomeKit. But that did not work either for me. But maybe it can work with Android devices or Android mobile phones. For me it did not work on Apple at all.</p><p>So now it is commissioned successfully. We get all the data from the interview. So far so good. So let's go to the matter integration. We find our device there. And that's it. A device auto discovered. It's working fine and as you can see I can turn it on and off very quickly. Thank you so much for watching this episode on matter.</p>