Matter OTA Updates

Hi everyone,

Homey recently showed me a lot of OTA updates for my Matter devices.

The updates for my Heiman smoke sensors went relatively smoothly. Only one device stopped during the process, but retrying the update worked fine. I was also able to update one IKEA Bilresa button, although it took at least 10 attempts.

However, I am now unable to update the two remaining Bilresa buttons or any of my window contacts.

I tried pressing the middle button every 10 seconds during the update, but that did not help. I also placed the buttons in the exact same location as the one that eventually updated successfully, but still no success.

The update process starts normally: first “Waiting for device”, then “Updating”, and the percentage starts increasing. Sometimes it only reaches 3%, sometimes it goes as high as 78%, but it always ends with “Update failed”.

For my Aqara U200, clicking the Update button in Homey immediately shows an “Invalid arguments” error. In the Aqara app, however, the firmware is shown as up to date.

From what I have read, Bilresa buttons and window contacts seem to update fine under Home Assistant. So I am wondering: what is going wrong with Homey here? Or am I missing something?

To update the billresa buttons, you have to try… and try… and try again…
It’s as if, with every unsuccessful attempt, it still updates a little bit. After 4 or 5 retries, they update.

I tried more than 10 times, without success.

I updated all my bilresa buttons with a lot of patience, first by “waking them up” (ie pressing the button), then starting the update and doing retry after each error

@Pascal_Nohl
Battery powered devices tend to enter sleep mode pretty quick, and apparently they do that also during OTA updating.

You’d try this: to keep the device awake, just push the pair button every few seconds during the update process.

Same procedure as with pairing new zigbee devices.

Thank you for the hint.
I tried that, several times, did not work.

The strange thing is that the one that worked, was still on the wall and I did even not touch it. It worked at the first try.

@Pascal_Nohl May I ask which smoke detector with Matter over thread from Heiman you use? Do they work well?

@Tom_ten_Den
The model must be the HK-HS1SA-M-1

I cannot really say how well it works in general. In my setup it often dropped from the network and had to be repaired. However, since firmware 1.7, the device seems to have become really stable.

According to Heiman, firmware 1.7 also added support for triggering the alarm from automations. However, I do not see such a card exposed in Homey.

I was told that Homey may intentionally suppress this function, possibly for legal or safety reasons, but I cannot confirm whether that is actually the case. At the moment, I can only say that the functionality seems to exist on the device/firmware side, but is not available as a Homey flow card.

They are affordable and monitoring or triggering a flow when they detect smoke works very well.

I’ve been trying to update an Eve Weather from v3.3 to v3.5 for literally weeks.

Probably around 100 attempts. It always failed.

I removed it from Homey, added it to Home Assistant and it updated the firmware on the first attempt.

Athom has a long way to go in this area.

Have you taken the battery out and put it back in again? It worked straight away for me afterwards, as the device was in sleep mode.

Yes tried that multiple times. Deleted the device and re-added too.
Nothing worked in that regard.

It would regularly get up to 80% before failing, so it’s not a connection issue.

I can simply tell you that I was able to update all my Eve devices via my Homey Thread network without any problems after using the battery trick. You might find an explanation here.

I can just tell you that it does nor work with any Ikea device for me. What I see is that it is like playing lottery, some rare cases, probably less than 1% it works.