I have received my first Matter device, a blind controller from ArpoBot. I had no luck trying to connect it to Homey but was (quite simply) able to connect it to Apple Home. I will try to connect it to Homey again at a later date (it seemed to find it but couldn’t get past the Thread connection), but in the mean time thought I would try and control it from a homey flow.
Would it work if I created a VD and made that available in Apple Home using HomeKitty. Then when I activated the VD it would initiate an automation with in Apple to make the blind go up or down.
Did you connect it to Apple Home using Thread/Matter? If so, you can enable pairing mode for the device from the Apple Home app, which will give you a (new!) pairing code that you can try with Homey.
Thanks Robert, I’ll give that a try.
Robert, I’m assuming that with other devices I will need to have the device close to Homey when I try to pair it. So is it the same as Z-Wave/Zigbee devices or is Thread/matter different?
If you pair it the way I explained the connection to Homey isn’t made over Thread but over the network, and it doesn’t matter if the device is close to Homey (FWIW, you should never pair Zigbee devices close to Homey either), as long as it’s within range of your Apple HomePod/ATV.
The device uses Thread to communicate with your Apple device, which in turn will act as a Thread Border Router and communicate using Matter with Homey.
Thanks for the explanation Robert. I did as you said and it worked so that great. I thought that that is how it should work.
Once I had the pairing code from Apple Home, I added a Matter device in Homey using the copied code. It asked if I wanted to add it via Homey or iOS. I chose Homey and it went through the process. From the status screen it appeared that it was communicating via Bluetooth. Could that be right?
No, Homey should pair the device over the network. Apparently it can’t 
You can also select to add via iOS, this only means that iOS is doing the discovery and then handing over the device to Homey. If you are using a Wifi Matter device you also need to make sure that it (and any potentially already connected Controller like a Homepod) is on the same network and subnet as your Homey because the mDNS discovery requests can’t go outside of your current subnet.
Thanks guys. It is working very well. Response time is very fast. It will be interesting to see as I migrate from Z-Wave to matter if response times continue to improve. The Aeotec smart switches still seem to be very erratic when it comes to performance. HP23 still hasn’t fully resolved it’s Aeotec Z-Wave issues.
So just fully coming to grips with Matter devices vs Z-Wave etc which require a special network hub such as Homey.
With my Z-Wave devices I need Homekitty or Alexa skills to expose those Devices to different control mechanisms such as Siri or Alexa. With Matter devices you can directly setup any Matter devices on all platforms separately and activate them in multiple ways.
Update - maybe not?
Robert is there a maximum number of hubs you can connect a Matter device to. I tried to use the same process to add these devices to my Alexa device but it failed.
I don’t know if there’s a limit. How did it fail?
