The listing confirms that the Hue Bridge will support Matter with a software update. Once the firmware arrives, it will make “all existing and new Hue lights and accessories automatically Matter-enabled, too (except the Hue Sync Box and dial of the Tap dial switch),” reads the database listing.
Does anyone know if this will affect the API that the bridge exposes and is used by the OH binding? I.e., if all Hue lights start to use Matter will the binding still be able to control them?
I guess it might be too early to know. I’m wondering whether I should block outbound connections from my Hue bridge to the internet to prevent it downloading the new firmware until we know what the impact of the new firmware will be.
It shouldn’t. They added support for Matter. There is no reason they would have to and strong reasons why they wouldn’t want to change their API.
For the most part, Matter is just Zigbee with a different networking scheme. That’s why they can support it with just a software update without needing to change the antennae and transceivers. But that’s how the bridge communicates with the devices, not how the bridge exposes the devices to OH through it’s API.
That’s why I’m curious about whether the API is affected. If the API is completely abstracted from the underlying communication method and the developers at Philips aren’t choosing to change the API at the same time then we’ve got nothing to worry about.
The Matter API will be exposed by the bridge alongside the current API’s, so nothing will break. And regarding Thread/ZigBee, they have officially announced they will stay with ZigBee.
Just so you know: the v2 API already exposes Matter related resources like any other device or service related resources. We don’t use those resources since the others are all that we need for OH. Currently the Hue matter implementation is still in Beta; they had promised a release in April but they are evidently in delay; there is no further news about this on their developer forum
Well that’s pretty cool. So at some point in the future if we can pair Matter lights to the Hue bridge we’ll be able to control them from openHAB even if we don’t yet have a Matter binding. Nice.
I hope they will eventually support Thread in new products.