It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Home Assistant, which gives the closest thing to the interconnected smart home marketing teams promised me. But the consortium behind Matter also promised things, and they’ve fallen short. The IP-based connectivity protocol was supposed to make the fractured smart device market into a glorious unity, but it’s been years now, and the promises have fizzled out.

But with Matterbridge installed as a Home Assistant add-on, I can realize the promise of Matter by passing any devices that work with Home Assistant to other Matter controllers without having to re-pair them all. But it’s more than just that, as it makes anything that isn’t going to get Matter support able to be shared as if it is.

It makes all your smart devices Matter-compliant

Yes, the promise of Matter is finally here

The smart home is broken. It’s been broken for quite some time now, with dozens of connectivity protocols, siloed manufacturer ecosystems, and voice control that doesn’t always work. Matter was supposed to fix this, but you know what they say about adding a new standard to fix the existing ones. You end up with more competing standards, even with the backing of every major tech giant in the smart home space.

Matter might not have been the revelation on the manufacturer’s side, but it’s perfect for Home Assistant. With Matterbridge translating HA into the Matter protocol, anything you have installed in HA can be controlled by HomeKit, Alexa, or Gemini.

Imagine all your Zigbee or Z-Wave devices that aren’t going to get Matter support officially, but now you can use them with Matter. Without the proprietary hub. They just work, thanks to the JavaScript version of Matter and a Home Assistant add-on.

But it’s not just the manufacturer’s smart devices that you can bridge. If you’ve made any ESPHome devices, you can expose those as Matter-compatible, making your DIY smart devices work with proprietary voice assistants. No more complicated setup, the add-on takes about five minutes to get installed and configured with the necessary HASS plugins.

Fast setup

Setting up your smart home should be simple

Smart home setup should be simple, and that’s why QR codes are often used, so all you need is to point a camera at the device to get it paired. Matterbridge does that too, but you’ll have to install the add-on in your Home Assistant before you get to that stage.

Add this to the custom repositories in the Add-on Store in Home Assistant:

https://github.com/t0bst4r/matterbridge-home-assistant-addon

After a quick refresh of the page, you’ll be able to install the Matterbridge Add-on and configure it with which entities you want exposed as Matter devices. Oh, and toggle the control to add it to the sidebar, so you can configure things inside Home Assistant without going to the web UI.

Then it’s a matter of adding plugins for HASS, zigbee2mqtt, Shelly, Eve, or a few other smart home ecosystems, and then everything can be controlled via Matter. You’ll notice a large QR code on the left of your configuration page, and that’s the one to scan to bring your Matterbridge devices into Google Home, HomeKit, Alexa, or anything else that works as a Matter controller.

And that’s it. A few minutes of setup time, and every device you’ve spent getting into Home Assistant is now a Matter device.

Seamless integration for unsupported or DIY devices

Bring your ESP32 creations into the world of Matter

Existing smart home devices are one thing, but what if you like making your own, with the popular ESP32 platform? Usually, those would only be able to be controlled via ESPHome, with local control and a bunch of code snippets to get them running in Home Assistant. Once you’ve got them inside Home Assistant as entities, you can now convert them to Matter-compatible devices.

That low-cost Zigbee motion sensor you cobbled together, the spread of random ESP32 boards around your home, those “weekend projects” that were fun to create but didn’t see any long-term applications. Everything can now be addressed with Matter, controlled by Matter, and integrated into your choice of smart home assistant.

It’s worth knowing that some device types still won’t be able to be used, but that’s a limitation of Matter’s specifications and not the Add-on. That’s mainly anything with a camera these days, as Matter’s latest version added many new device types, and that’s been integrated to Matterbridge.

Runs locally

Cut your dependence on the cloud

Smart home devices are supposed to be convenient, so it’s a pain when internet outages remove easy control because they rely on cloud services. I’ve been bringing as many of my smart devices under local control as possible, so that I can ditch apps off my phone and keep using my smart home when the internet goes down.

That’s one of the core tenets of Matter, that devices should rely on local-first connectivity for control. They can still use cloud services to add additional features, but the core functionality should be reachable from local endpoints. Matterbridge lets you do that for any devices that might even be cloud-first, because if they can be added to Home Assistant, they can be converted to the Matter protocol.

Matterbridge, combined with Home Assistant, is the smart home we were promised

The promise of the smart home was made to every level of tech competency, but it has mostly fallen short. No one manufacturer ecosystem covers the whole gamut of devices. Home Assistant fixes most of the fragmentation, but then you have to find your own solutions for voice control. Matterbridge pulls Home Assistant back into the mainstream, putting any devices that might not ever get Matter support into a format that the big voice assistants can use, unifying the smart home in the other direction. That’s why I feel it should be included on every Home Assistant installation, and with how easy it is to set up, there’s no reason not to.