Issue with Matter on self hosted Homey

Homey Self-Hosted Server
81

I have an OTBR running on Home Assistant and from day one I was facing the 0x00AC error.
What made this particularly frustrating is that sharing worked perfectly fine with my other border routers (Nest Hub and Homey Pro 2023). IPv6 in my setup was working correctly as well, and I could reach my Thread devices without issues using tools like NetShoot. So this was clearly not a “broken IPv6” or “basic network” problem.

To add some context about the environment: this SHS setup is running on a TrueNAS system on which I reliably host multiple apps and containers without any issues. This is a stable setup that has been in use for quite some time, not an experimental or misconfigured test environment.

After updating to v12.11, everything suddenly works flawlessly. I’m genuinely happy that I now finally have a fully working SHS.

That said, I do want to address the support experience, which I personally found disappointing.

After spending roughly two weeks actively following in multiple Matter and Thread-related forum topics, without any resolution, I decided to log a ticket with Homey. In my ticket, I explicitly stated that I had already searched and followed the forum extensively, and that there were multiple posts from users encountering the same 0x00AC error on different hosts.

The response I received was that Homey unfortunately could not provide support for my setup, that the 30-day trial exists for a reason, and that I should look on the forum for help, despite having clearly stated that I already did exactly that.

In my opinion, this is not customer-friendly, not to say arrogant.

What made it worse was that some forum members joined in by confidently stating that Homey could not possibly offer a solution here, and that the root cause must certainly be the user’s own installation or lack of knowledge. This was said without any understanding of the background or experience of the people they were responding to.

Everyone was a beginner at some point. Being addressed this way on a forum that is meant to help people is, frankly, discouraging.

For context: I installed my first Home Assistant instance back in 2014.
So yes, some of those comments were quite misplaced, and those members may feel addressed by this post.

I’m glad the issue is resolved with v12.11. I just hope that, going forward, both support responses and forum interactions can be handled with a bit more openness and respect, specially when multiple users report the same technical issue.

4 Likes
82

I completely agree. It was very poor.

In the forums I got the same response you did and on my support ticket an identical response. The Homey-SHS page states it supports Matter, but never did it mention I needed additional hardware for Thread. Maybe I could have known… but that set me back. Nevertheless I did have a Thread border router and it did not work. So the fact that I did not know that I needed it, made everyone say “you don’t understand how things work, it must be you”.

I started digging, but got lost since hardware I bought new (Matter-over-Wifi) did not work either… and now they said; “Yep! Confirmed! It’s your router, Docker config or you”.

This is the response I got in my support ticket:

… I understand the confusion about needing another hub other than the Homey Bridge to have a Thread border router.

The simplest answer is that this is a generational issue. The Homey Bridge does not support Matter/Thread and is equipped with a Zigbee 2.0 chip. The Homey Bridge arrived on the scene when Matter and Thread were still being developed and perhaps future generations will be able to act as border routers on their own.

For now this is all I can do for you, which is why I’m closing your ticket.

but… after this update, everything works.
So now, I hope the same.