I have a white series fan switch that hasn’t been paired to my Home Assistant setup in quite a while. I’m not sure when it stopped working (got disconnected) with HA, but I’ve ignored it until now when I’m trying to set up a bunch of switches.
Since the last time it worked, I’ve upgraded my home network and set up vlans - something I didn’t have before, and despite my best efforts to get this switch connected in HA again - either through open thread border router or by connecting it to my apple tv 4k - it refuses to pair.
I’ve spent way too many hours trying to figure it out and I’m about ready to throw in the towel. The new zigbee motion switches have been great so it got me wondering if the fan switch could be flashed to run zigbee. Pairing and using zigbee devices has been far more stable.
Is this possible or will I have to buy the blue series fan switch if I want zigbee?
I doubt it can be flashed to Zigbee, but for getting it to pair with Matter, what network are each of the following on:
HA
aTV(s)
Phone
To have a realistic chance of pairing, you’ll want all 3 of those on the name VLAN during pairing. After pairing the phone can move to a different VLAN.
My phone should be able to connect to any vlan directly with return traffic (I have a rule for it being an admin device), but now that i think about it I’ve only tested that in an ipv4 scenario. I tested pinging the ipv6 of the atv from home assistant and it worked. I also have a zi stick with open thread border router attached to HA, thinking that would make things simpler - plus HA should be more stable in terms of uptime than the atv, but yeah, no dice.
I could temporarily put them all on the same vlan, but then I have to remember to do that next time I add a device, which will be seldom enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll forget these details. That’s my hesitation to do it that way. I was hoping I could figure out the networking and make it work that way.
At one point I got matter over thread working with different VLANs, but it was when I was using a linux box as the router so I could run proper ULA subnets for ipv6, a customized Avahi config, and lots of custom firewall rules. It was a real pain, and I’ve since given up and gone back to Unifi, with all IoT and aTVs / HomePods on the same VLAN, and when i commission new devices I move my iPhone over to that VLAN as well.
Matter has some benefits (the multi-controller and multi-border router parts really help), but it was definitely designed with a hateful attitude towards VLANs.
Your phone must be on the same network as the main border router hub when pairing. Since matter is ipv6 and if you’re not actively issuing ipv6 addresses on your network, the main border router will make its own ipv6 network that other devices with link local addresses will join. I have yet to find a discussion thread about matter over thread or WiFi are routeable across vlans
I would honestly be pretty psyched if this was a thing that was possible in general, I’ve not been particularly happy with Matter/Thread as a standard and if I realized how big of a hassle it was going to be I would have gone with the Blue switches from the start. As it is I’ve got a dozen white switches and a few blues but almost everything else I ended up getting was Zigbee because Matter is just so… ugh.
So yeah, if it’s possible to flash the firmware on the white series to make them use Zigbee, even if it’s kind of involved, I would be interested in doing it.
Well, I abandoned z wave for most of my smart home for zigbee and looks like I’ll abandon Thread too. Luckily I’ve only really got this one switch that needs Thread. I guess I’ll wait for the blue fan switches that should be available next month.
