I have been trying to figure this out for a while now, but I can NOT get all of my switches online at the same time. Anywhere from one to nine (out 13 switches) are “unavailable” in my Home Assistant. Anyone else having connectivity/drop out issues?
My thread border routers are Home Assistant’s dongle as well as a Google Hub Max and Google Hub. No issues with the initial pairing.
I have this issue but with Apple TVs as hubs. Switches work just fine in apple home but randomly switches do drop in home assistant. Probably something to do with their thread handling.
I am having this too. I believe there is a firmware update for both HomePods, Apple TV, and Inovelli switches coming out today that maybe will fix this?
I found the Github thread here very interesting, as this mirrors my issues. Looks like multiple border routers might be the culprit? Matter is broken after being fixed · Issue #131001 · home-assistant/core · GitHub
I believe I figured out my issue. I have a google home hub max I got for free thru my phone provider, wife uses it in her office. I have it placed on an IoT VLAN which is not allowed to communicate to the main network.
In Home Assistant, under Thread, I noticed it’s still listed there. No way to remove it. I pulled power from the google hub and it disappeared from home assistant and all switches came back to life.
My interpretation is that home assistant is trying to communicate via the google hub which is on the wrong network and does not have ipv6 access. This in turn leads to failed communication via that route causing the switches to go unavailable. Oddly enough I thought the mesh network was supposed to be smart and try a different route via other routers to the switch in case of failures like this but maybe it has to be implemented that way or perhaps I had the wrong idea.
So I am at this point trying to figure out how to make home assistant ignore certain hubs.
Edit: spelling and context
Home Assistant’s Matter controller is not smart when there are multiple routes to the thread network. It generates a multipath route to the ipv6 prefix for the Thread network in the Linux kernel. It isn’t deterministic where a packet will go.
However, I thought that HA would use a local radio in preference to trying to route to another hub. On the other hand, perhaps the problem is in the reply path? What would stop a random device on the mesh from sending a packet to the wrong border router that can’t reach your HA? I’m just pondering aloud - I don’t know.
One potential thing though. When setting up a thread network, HA will always try to join an existing Thread network rather than creating its own. It will share Thread credentials with a google or apple thread network if you set it up on a phone.
Are you able to shut off the google home hub so that there is no Thread anywhere, and set up a new Thread network to move the devices to? Thread - Home Assistant talks about this. See " Case 1: Making Home Assistant your first Thread network" - which mentions as a prerequisite that “No third party thread networks are present”.
My main network is an Apple network. Apple doesn’t see the google hub. I set up home assistant a while after. I tried linking it with credentials from my phone and it sending credentials to one hub specifically. So far that seems be ok. I wonder if when that particular Apple TV restarts if home assistant will try to route thru the google hub again. Home assistant isn’t my primary device, it just acts as a supplement to HomeKit. I don’t have enough time currently to go thru and start my entire home over in home assistant and deal with learning pains. When I have a little time to tinker I do try things such as what I described and those were my findings.
Been waiting for a few days post Matter update (v1.0.5) and my connection has definitely (seemingly) improved since then. But it could also just be coincidence…
I’ve tried to do everything except fully starting from scratch because that’s a lot of repairing and re-automating that I don’t want to do haha.
I have noticed that even though my Home Assistant SkyConnect is the main border router, but they are all connected via the NEST-PAN Thread network.
