Has anyone had experience of using Matter for home lighting, automation, etc.? I've just decided to replace my Philips Hue lighting with Ikea's Matter ecosystem. My reasoning for this is two-fold:
- Whilst Zigbee is supposed to be a mesh, it doesn't feel like it. My 60s house has metal ducting for heating and this seems to cause problems for wireless stuff. My previous Philips Hue / Ikea Trafri system seem to have devices become frequently unavailable - especially those further from the hub.
- It is possible to create custom Zigbee devices (with a well-known leaked key), but Matter seems better supported and future-proofed.
So far I had a little bit of initial instability which I've put down to devices updating firmware. Other than that it seems fairly solid. I'm starting with Ikea's Dirigera hub for now. I might jump to Home Assistant later, but wanted to keep it simple until it's proven to be working, stable and wife-acceptable. Ikea have a good returns policy so if their stuff is junk it can all go back. Right now it's a hub, 27 bulbs, 8 switches and a temperature sensor all from one manufaturer. Other than being a larg(ish) setup and spread over a 2.4GHz wasteland it should be low risk.
As far as geeking out and expanding it, it was pretty easy to build the Nordic Matter light bulb sample on an nRF52840 and integrate that. My long term plans would be the potential for some custom sensors (doors being locked rather than just closed), actuators (hot air heating vents) and garage door openers (which Matter surprisingly does not support natively).
Anyway, enough rambling from me. Anyone else using Matter?
