IKEA Matter devices

My interest in Matter devices peaked when I noticed new CO2 sensor on the shelf when walking through my local IKEA store. It had yellow top, just like a bunch of new other devices.

My experience so far with Zigbee was quite good, but one fault with devices I used (or network itself), was that some times, maybe 3-4 a year, random device would drop off the network, it did not matter if device was mains powered, USB powered or running on batteries, Zigbee2MQTT service would simply stop receiving data, all control actions would stop working too.

Due to this reason I picked up quite a few Matter devices to replace problematic Zigbee devices, including the IKEA Dirigera Matter/Zigbee gateway.

I started my setup by wasting quite a lot of time trying to understand how Matter/Thread works, however these technologies are still quite over my head, and there don't seem to be good deep dives into actual protocol and how things connect.

Due to my networking setup (separate vlans for wired and wireless devices) I already had to drive back to IKEA to replace the Dirigera gateway thinking one I purchased was faulty, as it never showed up in IKEA Home smart application when trying to set it up, help articles on mobile app and their website did not mention anything about cross-vlan networking and that multicast (mDNS) traffic must be fully working.
Solution for this on my end was to create separate WiFi access point which would allow devices from WiFi on to the same VLAN as wired devices.
Then I could add the gateway to my Home smart app, and binding first temperature sensor via app was quite painless. However gateway and sensor were still standalone, and I wanted them in my HA.

Attempts to connect Dirigera gateway to Home Assistant were also quite time consuming.
Initially I was running Home Assistant in kubernetes, which complicates networking quite a bit.
First issue was that Matter python server was not able to connect to gateway, solution for this was to move Matter server to host network. Now HA saw gateway, but temperature sensor was missing and Matter server was throwing errors about not being able to connect to something.

Thinking that kubernetes might still be root cause of connectivity/networking issues, I moved HA on to baremetal hardware, Intel Nuc and a fresh setup.

On dedicated host for HA, things went more smoothly, I no longer had issues adding Dirigera gateway, but temperature sensor was still missing from HA when bound to Dirigera.

I left Matter devices for later time, as my entire home was down lights did not work, nothing worked - pushing light buttons on walls felt like dark ages.

I started binding all existing Zigbee devices to IKEA gateway and the process was a bit more painful than using Sonoff Zigbee dongle, light groups which were reset into binding more, only some of them would bind, and one or two lights would simple never bind, requiring me to climb to the ceiling, pull the light out and manually unplug/plugin it few time to reset it and try to bind it again, not a problem for a few lights, but when +15 fail to bind in this manner, it became quite a chore.

So once all lights were bound, then came the motion sensors - was quite easy and smooth.

Then the automation - HOLY FUCK, I could not use the motion sensors to trigger the lights, because HA did not receive any occupancy events. Connecting all other Zigbee devices to Dirigera gateway went right out of the window at this moment. I still could control the connected lights manually, but speed at which commands propagated through the network was extremely slow (at this time I had about 55 devices, almost all of them lights), took +10 seconds from click in HA to finally finish with switching the lights, and ~30% of the lights never changed their states - so random lights remained off or on.

So... the gateway was entirely useless for the purpose I wanted to use it, seemed like nice idea to get rid of dongle sticking out of the nuc in favor of something I could place remotely via POE and a splitter to Ethernet+USB-C to power the gateway.

My next step was to drop any sort of gateway for Matter, as devices connected to Matter gateway seem to have issues displaying on HA for me. I wanted HA to be a gateway.

Luckily I was able to get another kind of Sonoff dongle locally next day: ZBDongle-E, which seemed to support custom Openthread RCP firmware for Matter.
Via this website I was able to easily flash new dongle: https://darkxst.github.io/silabs-firmware-builder/

In the end I went back to using:

• Sonoff ZBDongle-P - for Zigbee network
• Sonoff ZBDongle-E - for Matter network

Reconnecting Zigbee devices back to Sonoff has shown how shitty experience I had when connecting them to IKEA Dirigera. With Sonoff everything went smoothly and only 1 random light failed to bind which needed me to reset at the ceiling.

For Matter devices I still had some trouble as Home Assistant and Companion app seem to remember the IKEA gateway even when I seem to have removed it from all possible places, HA mobile app still seem to have tried to use it even though it was no longer available and the Sonoff dongle should have been used to connect devices - in the end full restart of the Home Assistant host resolved it issue.

Don't buy IKEA Dirigera if you will be using Home Assistant, get yourself dedicated dongle for Matter/Thread.

P.s. I have not tried, but MultiPAN RCP firmware is available that would allow you to use single dongle for Zigbee and Matter, but general consensus on forums/github is that this is a shitty approach and is not recommended.

Fin.