Here is my first experiments using the M200 Aqara hub as my Thread Border Router for Matter.
It was first a big challenge to start the Aqara Home app on my Android phone because creating an account is failing for certain email addresses, at least in France. I was forced to use my gmail.com email to be able to receive a verification code by email ! I received nothing when using a mail in domain free.fr
Adding the Aqara hub in the app was not as easy as I would imagine, it required several tries but it finally succeeded.
Here comes the first Matter over Thread device, a smoke sensor from Heiman company.
I tried first to add this new Matter device in the Aqara home app. Several tries but it never succeeded !
Then I decided to add this Matter device using Google Home. It was very easy and Google Home automatically found the Aqara hub as Thread Border Router. The device was added quickly in Google Home. Note that Google Home is not able to display the battery level for example. I also found nothing in Google Home to update the device firmware through OTA.
Then I generated a new pairing code in Google Home for this device and used openHAB thing search with this pairing code. It takes a certain time, at least 30 seconds, but the thing was finally added to the inbox. I could create the thing, the thing went ONLINE and many channels were exposed. Linking items to these channels worked well. So this Matter over Thread device is now working in openHAB using the Aqara hub as Thread Border Router.
Then I decided to try again to add this device to the Aqara Matter controller, using a pairing code generated by openHAB. Once again, it failed ! Maybe Aqara is not supporting this device. I hope I will be able to add other Thread devices to this Matter controller, in particular Thread devices from Aqara I bought.
I was then able to remove the smoke sensor from Google Home.
I will now check in the next days that the things (I finally added two Heiman smoke sensors) remain always ONLINE in openHAB.