After working with Zigbee2Mqtt for years, I recently got a Matter over Wifi Light Bulb to get familiar with Matter in OpenHab.
Now my first problem starts early. As far as I understand, when using Wifi, it’s necessary to get the devices to the local Wifi first, to be able to pair it with OpenHab.
Common suggestions in the Internet is to use Google Home, Apple Home, Alexa, or the vendor’s app to get the device to the wifi network first, then create another token to pair it with OpenHab.
Unfortunately I don’t have a Google Home Device (An android smartphone is not enough) and all my Alexas are older than the Matter era. My iPhone is a corporate iPhone where Apple Home is blocked. The vendor’s app (AiDot) does not support creating such Admin Token for the devices.
I also stumbled upon some tool named “chip-tool”, that obviously should be capable of doing this via my Pi, yet I didn’t manage to get or build this as well yet.
Do you know about any more ways to connect a matter device to the wifi and create such a pairing token?
I have successfully connected several devices managed by AiDot to my matter network. In all of these cases, AiDot is not the matter controller, it is just used for that initial WiFi connection (the device has no other way than a bluetooth connection via the AiDot app to allow you to input your ssid and wifi password). However, once you have connected the device to the wifi the device itself is capable of connecting to a matter fabric (network).
You should be able to tell if the device is one that can connect directly or not fairly easily. Somewhere, probably on the device or, if not, with the documentation, there’s a sticker or paper
slip with the matter symbol and an 11 digit code or a QR code. If you have that code then you do not the app after the device is connected to the wifi, you connect the device directly to OH’s matter controller. The process for that connection is:
Make sure you have used the OH matter binding to create a matter controller thing.
On the UI page for that thing, under the Actions heading, there is an option for “Pair a matter device”. Clicking on that option will bring up a dialog that asks for a manual pairing code.
You should be able to enter the code from your device directly into the dialog and press execute to add the device to OH’s controller.
This didn’t work unfortunately, the original code is only usable once for the main Admin. However I found out that one of my alexas DOES support matter and I managed to pair with it, then create the Multi-Admin code to pair with Openhab.
Yes, and OH is capable of being that primary controller if you don’t connect the device to any other matter fabrics first. I don’t know your specific device and I haven’t worked with any light bulbs, but one of the main points of matter is that if the device has that primary code, it can be connected to any controller as the primary controller. After that first connection, however, you will always have to use that primary controller to create secondary codes to share that node between different controllers.
This sounds a little bit like an early issue I had with my matter setup as well. It’s possible your IPv6 config for openhab is not correct. The device may require IPv6 for initial fabric inclusion and thereafter be able to work just on IPv4. So, OH wasn’t able to connect to the device without a correct IPv6 config, but Alexa’s default IPv6 config was sufficient for that. And then once the bulb was added to Alexa’s fabric, IPv4 was sufficient to share it with OH.
The good news is that, other than that extra step, there really shouldn’t be any difference so there’s no reason to go back and reconfigure the bulb. If you got it working, run with it. But I do recommend triple checking the IPv6 settings on whatever is running OH for you.
