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I am a domotics enthusiast and I use some ESP8266 chips for various uses, mostly with HomeAssistant on my RPi. I recently bought some Zigbee devices and the benefits seem very interesting for IoT compared to WiFi.

However, it seems that Zigbee will be replaced by the unified protocol "Matter" that should arrive this year's fall (source).

For instance, I have a Zigbee2MQTT dongle and I was tempted to buy some CC2530 ZigBee chips but I understood they will not be directly compatible with Matter. Obviously, ESP8266 will not either.

However, I could not find anything related to actual products that will rely on Matter

Is this technology worth investigating for hobbyists like me?
If yes, is there a chip that could be used like an ESP?

(If not, would ZigBee be worth it or should I stick to WiFi for now? TW: opinion-based subquestion)

Helmar
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Dan Chaltiel
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Technology-wise there's nothing keeping you from making a Matter-compatible ESP or controller now. Just read the 1k+ pages of spec, see what's relevant and implement it. With your own controller you could also talk to your own ESP using Matter. Take shortcuts where needed (x509 certificates for example). You'll end up with something very Matter-like without being certified.

However, other Matter controllers might not trust your ESP as it'll not be listed as certified Matter device in the ledger. The reaction might be warnings or outright refusal of operation. In the same way certified Matter devices will not connect to your own controller.

If your goal is to see if it's worthwhile yourself you could do that and maybe at a later point there'll be a way to get hobby-projects in as well.

Helmar
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Personally, I'm sticking to ESP32 boards for all my upcoming projects. I'm lucky that I only have two ESP8266 boards in use right now. I will probably upgrade them to something at some point.

From my understanding, Matter will work over typical wifi, a thread network, and in some cases on the same spectrum as ZigBee, but it will also require bluetooth to set up. I don't know of any boards out right now that can work with matter over the ZigBee spectrum, but I do know that HomeAssistant and ESPHome just released a tutorial (that you can try today) using matter on an ESP32.

I hope this helps!

Jake Lipson
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My understanding is that TASMOTA firmware already implements MATTER on chipsets that have enough memory, so hobbists could already create their own TASMOTA devices. But problems arise when we try to add the device to a MATTER network because, as the device is not certified, we cannot provide the key that is required. At least this was my experience.

Giovanni Turco
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