This is a post about domotica; house automation. I'm going to write a bit about relatively new standards: "Matter" and "Thread" and why their promise of privacy and manufacturer independence finally got me enthusiastic about subjecting mechanical parts in my house to automation. I'll also write up the steps I took trying to hook up an Eve Thermo to a Home Assistant (Yellow) without Apple or Google hubs or their apps.

Alright I'm going to cover quite a bit of ground here so feel free to skip the bits you don't care about:
- What is it
- Why do I feel Thread and Matter are a game changer
- A little rant on naming is hard
- Writeup on experience of setting up a smart thermostat and hub
- Conclusion

Full disclosure: None of this is sponsored. Well, maybe by the grace of my wife letting me buy this stuff :D

What is Thread and Matter anyways

Simply put: "Matter" is a "language" devices speak to each other (like an API) while Thread is the network connection (like Wi-Fi or Zigbee).

While Thread and Matter go hand in hand, they are completely separate techs and do not need to be used together. In fact, you currently still find many devices that may support Matter but no Thread. In my search for devices I do almost always see them together though. Maybe just a matter of time.

These techs are an open source standard and royalty free. They are a result of collaboration between larger (and smaller) companies like Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Google, and many more. I'm not sure about the nitty gritty here but that's the tl;dr.

Matter

Actually you can read more nitty gritty on wikipedia. Apparently Matter was started 5 years ago but was first published about 2 years ago.

The point of Matter is to be a unified standard for devices to communicate with each other. This in contrast with every company releasing their own hub (Alexa, Nest, etc) and coming up with their own way of communicating with their devices.

I think it's important to note that you still do need a hub of sorts, but you should only need one for all these devices and they don't need to be from a big tech source either. Heck, with some fiddling you could turn your own computer into a hub. I wouldn't recommend it since I prefer to have a dedicated device for it. But you could. I settled on Home Assistant (Yellow) for this, which has a Matter plugin/extension/integration to support this. The integration says it's still in beta but it worked fine for me out of the box.

Thread

Turns out Thread is even older, dating back to 2014. The reference is a little short here so I'm not sure about its roadmap since.

Thread is a "an IPv6-based, low-power mesh network". It's meant to be compatible with networks available in almost every home today (your ethernet/Wi-Fi) and the internet in its current form.

Similar to Matter, Thread is free to ship (though I don't know about the ramification of the caveat) and use.

Matter over Thread

Looks like Matter designed itself around backwards compat being able to use your Wi-Fi and internet, while also targeting Thread due to its low energy usage. That is important because many of these home automation devices are actually battery powered.

While Matter supports a wide range of networking, officially it only supports Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Thread. Oh and Bluetooth (LE) for onboarding. But not Zigbee, Z-Wave, etc.

Game changer

To me this standard is a game changer.

Being in tech it's no surprise that there's a natural attraction to automating certain things in my house. However, being in tech it's also no surprise that I'm extremely conservative to wiring up my light switches to the internet. There's some bad people out there!

IoT has in fact always held me back from home automation, simple as that. I'm not interested in having a Siri or Alexa in my home. I'm not interested in cementing a device in my home, only to be bricked next year when the company goes bankrupt. Or worse, the company simply moves on to the next version, leaving older devices in the dust, shutting down their servers with no alternative. We've seen many examples of that and every time it reaffirms my conservative views on home automation.

This feels different for at least two reasons: Matter and Thread are agnostic to the manufacturer which means not one company owns and can sunset the tech, and the techs are open source and fairly freely available which makes it more likely that other companies jump on the bandwagon to support it too. That's what drives an ecosystem. That's also why, when these devices are set up as Matter over Thread devices, these companies can't turn them into bricks if you don't want them to. Okay, unless they push a firmware update to brick them and you apply it, then yes. But not because they shut down a remote server..

There is a second reason why I'm excited for this era of home automation: privacy! Using Thread I can make a completely separated network in my home that is in fact not connected to the internet, unless I want it to be. It can be completely air gapped.

I got a Home Assistant Yellow that is explicitly not the PoE version. PoE is when a device draws their power from the ethernet cable. But I wanted a separate power plug because I wanted to be able to remove the ethernet cable from the hub. While that does have a drawback, it does separate the Thread network from the eth/Wi-Fi network and I don't have to worry as much about a random script kiddie abusing a zero day while I'm asleep.

In a similar vein, by not requiring internet for these IoT devices, I'm not left literally in the cold and dark when there's an internet outage. Doesn't happen too frequently where I'm at but it does happen. Thread won't give a hoot.

And in the case of an actual power outage, well, the critical devices (like the radiator thermostat) are battery powered and can still be manually operated. I'm not sure about things like a lock but I'd be surprised if they couldn't, though I'll admit that I'm probably never going to buy an IoT lock for anything serious. But that's an aside.

So having complete ownership and control of my house, making sure these home automation devices still work in ten to twenty years, not susceptible by the whims of manufacturing companies, zero upkeep fees, air gapped from the internet, ... yes, this actually works for me! So I'm happy to splurge a few bucks on this.

Naming is hard

There's a running gag in tech that there's a few things that are hard. The top 3 varies per person but commonly you'll hear timezones, caching, and naming things. This was no exception.

while the names "Matter" and "Thread" may be on point and/or a pun to some extent, they are horrible as product names. And don't get me wrong, they're not even bad from a "catchy" point of view. But by using generic dictionary names you make it impossible to search for these devices, hurting discoverability which in turn hurts traction.

This smells like Meta engineering all over it though I don't see Meta named as a collab anywhere. Facebook engineering has the worst naming for stuff.

Consider something like "Zigbee". That's universally unique and easy to search for.

You know what "Matter" does? Gives you result that matter or of a particular fabric. "This xxxx zigbee device matters a lot to people because of it's soft matter". Great.

You know what "Thread" does? It translates to "wire" in other languages. You know, like needle and thread? And it's even worse when a website (or like Google search) auto-translates the keyword to your local geo language, making it no longer related to Thread at all. Ali express did this and it was actually funny for the first two seconds. Sure. Until I realized what it implied for the average non-English user: no searching for Thread for you.

It's just super frustrating to search for a certain device with this support, maybe exacerbated by the fact that it's still a new tech and you have find devices that support it in an about 20 years old sea of IoT devices. :ironic-thumbs-up-with-wink:

Searching for temperature sensors

For example: I tried searching for a cheap temperature sensor that supports Matter and Thread and found ... well virtually nothing that can be considered cheap.

There's a sensor for Aqara but it looks like it currently requires their proprietary hub to run it over Matter, and I'm not even sure about Thread. Considering recent announcements I think that may be a temporary traction thing but in its current form I don't dare pulling the trigger. This is Temperature and Humidity Sensor T1. They market it as Matter but apparently only because the sensor sends it to their hub which then forwards it over Matter. That's not what I'm looking for (and would give the whole thing a vastly more expensive base cost). However, the "Aqara Motion and Light sensor P2" allegedly does work without their Aqara hub and announcements are coming in of new devices that do support Matter/Thread so I think it's a matter of time on this one.

Then there's the Eve Thermo Control. I actually have one of these and they do work properly without any kind of Apple HomeKit / Google / Eve app / whatever. I synced it up to Home Assistant and that was that. There's a caveat about onboarding Eve Thermo to it, see below, but sensor wise it works fine. However, these currently pop at about 75 euro which is far from "let's put one in every room" kind of pricing. On the upside, it has a USB-C chargeable battery which is a feat that was surprisingly refreshing to me. We have tons of rechargeable batteries here for various devices, but still the USB-C charging feels nicer?

There is also Arre's Tuo Temperature Sensor which explicitly states Matter over Thread support. It's just at 40 euro a pop which is also not "let's put one in every room" level of my wallet. I'm looking for something like ten bucks a pop. Another downside is the use of a CR2032 button battery, which means no rechargeable battery. In that case I'd rather have AA or AAA's.

My final mention is a weird experience that exemplifies the naming issue: the Qingping Temperature Humidity Sensor T Version. This one is hard to find and I'm still not sure if it even supports Matter (but in its current form I think no?) but this is the one that supports Thread at least. They have three versions of this particular model, one is Bluetooth/Thread ("Threaded" or "T-model"), one is Bluetooth, and one is Bluetooth/Mi. Mi is the Chinese counterpart to Apple Home (and I guess Google Home?) called Mi Home. Even searching on Amazon for something like "temperature thread" will not show that device but plentiful sewing kit results. That's just bonkers and shows you bad the name is.

There are some other measurement devices out there but they are currently either exclusively Zigbee (like Sonoff and Shelly) or require some online setup/upkeep like with Tado (allegedly great devices but apparently requires an online account regardless, no thanks).

False requirements

There's one other point of frustration and that's with false advertisements of requirements.

Take for example that Qingping temperature sensor. It explicitly states "Need to set up HomePod or Apple TV as a home hub.", they nuance it a bit by stating "To use Thread connection, you need to set up a Thread-enabled home hub, such as ..." but still, it seems not to be true.

Or take Eve's Thermo. I was really on the wall for a long time because they, apparently, used to be a HomePod (Apple Home) device maker and only recently started supporting Android and Matter/Thread. Last November or December they released an Eve Thermo (Thread) which eased my mind and made me pull the trigger. I was able to onboard the Thermo's to Home Assistant without any proprietary Eve apps. And I don't have any of the (Apple) HomeKit stuff in my house either. But you wouldn't know by reading their website.

I have to nuance this a little bit: their previous version shipped without Thread support and required a firmware upgrade which, allegedly, required their proprietary app to update which at the time was only available for ios. The one I bought was with the newer firmware with Thread support and so I did not need this step. The marketing at that time also only really talked about Apple HomeKit and what not, which it seems to do less now, so that may have improved.

Then there's the other angle, "yes it supports Matter but only if you use our hub". Looking at you, Aqara. I'm not sure if it's "false advertisement" but it's at least a little misleading. I do suspect that Aqara will ship devices that do have onboard Matter and Thread support soon, so that may be more of a transition thing than anything else. But there's more examples like that and you have to be careful. It's not easy to vet all of them and I guess you're left to blog posts like this to figure out whether or not a device is truly agnostic of its manufacturer or not, or at least ot what extend.

Okay enough about that. Let's get to the meat.

Setting up Eve Thermo on Home Assistant

I've tried to write down the things I did while unboxing and setting up things. Hope it helps you.

Hardware

Let's begin by stating the hardware.

My journey started because we have two radiators that we wanted to control through domotica so I'm starting conservatively with just stuff I need to control them. These are called "TRV"s or "Thermostatic Radiator Valve". They're knobs that you twist to control the radiator.

I bought two "Eve Thermo (Matter)" devices. If the Matter/Thread part is relevant to you then be careful with what you buy. Their previous models did not ship with Thread and require a firmware update. Not all sites display an equal amount of information and if you're like me then you have to be careful to make sure you get this Matter/Thread primed device, not an older iteration. The key is the title of the product, "(Matter)" is part of the product name. I got mine from Amazon as that was the only source I could trust in this context at this time. Note that you can click for alternate versions there and note that the other "Thermo" versions do not have "(Matter)" in their title.

I also bought the "Eve Thermo Control (Matter)", this one only seems to be available with Matter/Thread primed so I think you can't go wrong here. I wanted to connect both the Thermo's to this controller though at this point I'm not so sure.

Finally I bought a "Home Assistant Yellow" ("HA") (website) to serve as the hub. While the Thermo's work in manual mode just fine, they do need some kind of hub in order to automate anything at all. For me, HA does that job. At the time of writing there's two versions of HA available: blue and yellow. Blue is less powerful but completely assembled and set up. Yellow requires a little bit of assembly and setup but as we'll see, it's not that bad. I also got a hard drive for the HA but I'm not entirely sure whether that was worth it right now (it's optional). But oh well.

Total splurge investment: about 153(2xthermo)+77(thermostat)+143(HAY)+104(CM4)+77(ssd)= 554 euro. That's fine in the context of the bill after having just finished a major home redecoration.

TRV's considered

I doubted for a long time which smart radiator thermostat to buy. There's a few models available and they all had some pros and cons.

Tado seems to be well liked but from what I can tell it requires an online account, at least for onboarding and maybe even afterwards too. That's a big no for me so tado was not an option.

Samsung has one but I couldn't figure out whether or not it could be used without their proprietary smart hub "SmartThings". Just because it supports Matter doesn't mean it supports Thread. I couldn't get a conclusive answer on whether these Samsung devices can work properly with HA if you don't have a SmartThings hub. So I skipped this too.

There's a few others out there but not that many with the promise of Matter over Thread except for the obvious player: Eve. But when I was doing research on this in December, it looks like Eve had only just jumped on the Matter bandwagon so information was still young and most of their marketing was still "you need apple hubs for this to work". And it was probably not wrong, at the time.

Installing the Eve Thermo

Okay so you get a radiator knob, two batteries, and some converters.

Ultimately the way these knobs work is by extruding a surface that pushes a mechanical pin on the radiator. That pin controls the mechanical valve which opens or closes the flow of warm water into the radiator to some extent. Very mechanical in itself. Smart radiator knobs do the same thing but with a small motor that you can automate. This makes compatibility itself not much of a problem aside from the screw size.

So aside from the "will it work without Apple" question, I wasn't sure about screw size compatibility. The radiators were brand new but that didn't mean that their size matches that of Eve's TRV's. Eve is a German company, I live in the Netherlands, I have no idea how standards work in this space. I had read that the Eve TRV's came with some adapters and, well, I didn't really have a choice but to just yolo it and hope it matches. Luckily enough the TRV would screw on flawlessly so I didn't need to use any of the adapters. They feel a bit like cheap hard plastic but that may be the norm for that industry so what do I know.

We had a plumber come over for other reasons after reconstruction work so asked him to help us with installing one. I'm not good at this stuff, always worry that I permanently break something in my house. I did read that installation was easy and indeed, it was easy. Twist off the old knob (this can't spill water, the knobs only push a pin, they never even get wet), twist on the new one, done. Provided you don't need the converter, the installation was a breeze. Not saying it otherwise wouldn't have been but I just don't know.

The controls are easy and intuitive to use and that's all for the hardware installation.

Installing the Home Assistant Yellow

This one felt a little more daunting. Assemble the Yellow.

I've never really been into hardware tbh. I love software but hardware feels meh. So while I obviously know about Arduino/Raspberry and all that jazz, I've never felt compelled to actually build anything, despite JSConf trying hard to persuade me otherwise :p

So you basically receive three parts for the HA, including the optional SSD: The transparent casing with the Raspberry installed, the "compute module" (cm4), and an ssd stick. Plus some tiny parts like screws and thermal pads.

At the time of ordering HA stated they now supported CM5. I wasn't sure and didn't want to deal with an installation guide that didn't quite match my parts so I just went with the cm4.

The reason I went with the Yellow over the Blue was mainly because the Blue would require a dongle to support Thread, while the Yellow has one built in. I don't mind the dongle as much but if I have to do this from scratch anyways, I may as well do it like this. The Yellow is also a bit more powerful and so why not. Maybe I'll go for their voice solution at some point in time, which would need this. But arguably that's just over-engineering on my part :p

The worst part of the guide for me was to apply the heat sink because I didn't realize that the sticky thermal pads would immediately stick to the sink while I was still trying to calibrate the position. So at this point I'm just hoping the pads are still in the proper position but I can't see anymore. After a few days it's still working so I guess it's at least not entirely botched? :p

The rest is straightforward. Plugging in the ssd was also a simple step.

One thing to add: the device has no "on/off" button. It'll power on as soon as you connect the power (I do not have the PoE version). With no screen or whatever that feels a bit sketchy but I was able to complete the steps without issue so apparently that's all fine. Just a tad too implicit to my liking. I'm not sure what the blue button actually does, but I don't care much either as the box sits in a closet anyways.

Software setup

With the hardware installed and ready it was time to do software steps. To be honest, this was not a big deal in my experience. I was able to stay on the happy path so it worked fine for me.

There's three steps: initializing and setting up the HA box, connecting the Eve Thermo knobs, and connecting the Eve Thermo Control.

Home Assistant setup

We're following this guide.

I'm running a flavor of Ubuntu linux. I was able to download the raspberry pi software, which you only need to create a bootable usb stick. Once installed you open it and select the first dropdown. It wasn't immediately apparent to me that it was a scrollable dropdown so that was confusing. But once you realize that, the steps in the guide make more sense and it's easy to create a usb stick. Provided you have one. You did prepare one, didn't you? Oops. Not a big deal but it does seem a bit odd to require a usb stick for setup when that's not mentioned. It wouldn't be the first time I'd have to run to the store to find a stick for something.

The usb was flashed without a problem and I just stuck it in the HA hub, removed and connected power, and let it do its thing. It'll find the usb when booting up and with the eth connector it does not need wifi credentials setup or anything so it just goes.

I guess that's another requirement that's a biiit implicit: you need an ethernet connection to get started. That may not be a big deal for most, but when you're wifi router is inaccessible, or maybe has no ethernet ports, or like with me, all ports are already taken, then that's a bit of a surprise. So yes, at least for setup, HA requires an ethernet connection. This is implied for the PoE version since that hub draws its power from the ethernet cable :p

And while I'm running my HA without internet, it does require internet to set up and download packages (and later, plugins/integrations), so ethernet/internet will be required regardless even if only for a little bit. Totally fine with me.

Once it's ready installing, as indicated by happy (non-)flashing leds, you have to remove power, remove the usb stick, and power it again. The first boot will take a while, just setting up stuff and installing scripts I guess. Took like five minutes for me. At some point you should be able to ping the machine which exposes itself as homeassistant.local on your network. You can also use the ip address but you'd have to discover it first (usually your router can show you).

At this point you can access the control panel from the desktop at the default location: http://homeassistant.local:8123/

No mobile app required! ... yet.

The first time you go to the HA control panel it requires you to create an account. Oh no, that's what I was trying to avoid! This is just a local machine account. Oh! Just like your router and machines like it, pick something and store it in your password manager so you don't lose it.

Matter and Thread integrations

So after losing yourself in the interface and getting familiar with it we want to connect the Eve devices over Thread.

I first tried to just use their app and connect the Eve Thermo but no, that requires a Thread border router. Dang. So I was stuck with having to get another hub to serve as border router anyways? I was hoping to dodge that bullet. Turns out, Home Assistant can totally be a Thread Border Router! So you don't need any other particular hub to serve as a thread border router for this. You can use the HA. Yay!

Okay but how the heck do you do that? I didn't really know how to proceed so after some searching I figured out what to do next: In order to support Matter and Thread you have to install their "integrations" (/plugins/extensions). Not sure why it wouldn't do that out of the box but maybe that's because the Yellow ships with Zigbee enabled by default. Probably a matter of time.

I started by installing the Matter integration from https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/matter/ You can open that page in the same session as where you have the HA control page opened. Click the blue "add integration" button in the top-left of the page and it'll pop over to the HA control panel.

For the questions, I picked the "supervisor add-on" because this was the only Matter server I have. After a minute or so it'll show a popup stating it finished. Then, go to devices (in menu, lcick settings, devices and services) and there'll be a "Matter (BETA)" entry under services. It won't have any devices yet but once you've added them, they'll be listed here. We first need to install Thread before we can continue.

Install the Thread integration from https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread Same steps as before.

Switch from Zigbee to Thread

Next step is to switch the HA from Zigbee to Thread. This is a machine configuration thing, not done from the integration.

On the Thread integration page is a section that says "If you have a Home Assistant Yellow or Connect ZBT-1, you can use their Thread radio.", but you have to enable it first. Oh! We turn to https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread#turning-home-assistant-into-a-thread-border-router

I followed "case 1: Make Home Assistant your first Thread network". Since I have a Yellow the radio was good to go. As such I followed this sub-guide next: https://yellow.home-assistant.io/procedures/enable-thread/

My HA did not have the multi-protocol enabled by default so I could skip the mini guide of disabling that.

I deleted the Zigbee integration. See ya never. Note that the guide uses a slightly confusing yet correct text "behind the Yellow integration", with which they meant the three dot menu to the right, like in the screenshot.

Now we're going to the hardware config to see the option to switch between Zigbee and thread. Pick your firmware, select Thread. This takes a minute, you'll see some cpu activity in the background, and then a popup will show "setup complete".

The step says to ignore Zigbee but I don't have the "Zigbee Home Automation" device card anymore so I'm not able to ignore it here. I don't think that matters much? Probably more of a UX QoL.

Ok, now back to the Thread integration. Click configure. Confirm your HA is the Thread Border Router. Do a Happy dance.

Onboarding the Eve Thermo

We want to add the Eve Thermo to the HA. This is moment suprême. Will it blend work?

This is also a moment of disappointment in the HA eco system. HA requires you to use their proprietary phone app to onboard devices, for the sake (or the guise) of UX. The docs will explain you that the phone basically carries the matter-network-credentials from the HA device to whatever device you want to onboard, because it's probably easier to get your phone to a new device than the HA box itself. Plus some other reasons of reducing complexity. I mean, that makes sense, but I'm not sure if they've couldn't have left an alternate route to onboarding open that wouldn't require an app (or apple/android phone, for that matter) if you really wanted it. That's a disappointment, ngl. But since I definitely do have one of those, I guess I can skip the sadface here and just install their damn app temporarily. I should note that the Matter spec actually requires commissioning through BLE, but the HA has bluetooth so technically it wouldn't need to require doing that via a phone.

- In the app login with the local account created before and go to devices.
- Go to main menu > companion app > troubleshooting (near bottom) > sync thread credentials
- (Not sure if that's also required if you sign in after doing the thread integration steps but I didn't and had to do this afterwards. It's a quick step.)
- Add a new device by tapping the big "Add integration" button.
- Select "no, it's new". You'll need to enable a bunch of permissions (at least in this session) for bluetooth, location, camera.
- Scan the QR code on the "back" of the knob. Hope you can still twist it as its back most likely very close to a wall, impossible to photograph reliably. Oops. I was able to turn the knob around faaaairly easily, and then turn it back. ymmv
- QR scanner is quite fast, no issues there
- After scanning it asks you if you're ready. You're not.
- Most likely the knob has had batteries for more than ten minutes at this point. You'll need to evict them (pry open the cap, doesn't require that much force, and pull out the batteries, then put them back in). I think this is the only way.
- After restarting the device, touch and hold the two up and down buttons for a few seconds. The leds will turn to two flat lines.
- Press start on the phone.
- It'll search and should find the Eve Thermos fairly quickly, you should see it transfer Thread credentials. If you skipped the border router step above the app will now tell you that it requires a border router. Read back up.
- Note: the first time it timed out for me. I think that was because I didn't remove the batteries first. Trying again will require you to scan the QR code every time.
- When it finds the device the two lines on the Eve device will blink quickly and then go away. I think that's a sign that it's connecting?
- For me, this step always ends in a timeout though, even with other devices. However, I could see the device show up in the HA control panel. So I think that's a bug in the finalization of this step, despite setting up successful. I've ignored it.

In the HA control panel, the Eve Thermos shows a few things for me: the current temperature, the target temperature, the valve position (how much water it allows through), whether the firmware is up to date (and which firmware it has), the battery status, and the voltage (I guess more of a generic thing because why is that relevant here but ok). Once the devices is added it will also show a nice control UI in the overview page as well. All out of the box, zero config.

Pressing "Identify" will show a nice icon with the device, which is nice if you have multiple connected and they all have the same name initially.

The Thermos can also do child lock and some automation and they are not immediately exposed in HA. Luckily, I don't need child lock anymore and the automation is driven from HA, so these are non-issues for me. As far as I understand these are not exposed because either Matter doesn't support an API for that action (yet) or because Eve didn't implement it or because HA doesn't offer a UI control for it. I'm not sure which is which here.

HA also showed me that there was an update available. Hmmm, updating the firmware of a device that runs on batteries over a low powered network, how could that possibly go wrong. So obviously I yolo'd that, and it worked fine. Update "20EBP1701" was available to me. The thermo device shipped on 3.3.0 and this would update it to 3.5.1 so that's better, right? I'm a little reluctant to burn new firmware without knowing why it needs an update and tend to wait a little bit of time to make sure it doesn't just brick the device. but as this is fresh out of the box it makes sense for a newer firmware to be available. It also links to the release notes, which is nice. Unfortunately, Eve's website does not have a release timestamps :( and very summary description :( But oh well.

Conclusion: seems we can properly add Eve Thermos to Home Assistant (Yellow) without requiring any iOS devices for Matter/Thread reasons. It does need Android or iOS for onboarding reasons, which is a HA requirement, not Eve. And it'll even allow you to update the firmware. Very nice.

Second Thermos was a quick experience, knowing what to expect. The onboarding timed out again but the devices seems to be properly onboarded regardless.

Onboarding the Eve Thermo Control

The thermostat follows a similar onboarding pattern as the Thermos.

I did need to actually read the startup menu because I couldn't figure out how to restart the device, which is required for onboarding :p So here you go: to reset it, press left and right for 10s until the restart icon (round arrow) appears. This is a bit unreliable for me but it'll work eventually but that's not the end. With the icon showing, use a tiny pin to press the reset button on the back. It's a tiny hole (says "reset") in the top-right of the back. The button clicks a bit. Pro tip: always keep a sim card slot expulsion tool around. Perfect pin resetters.

The device will reset, you'll notice the background flash black and white when it's done. That's when you start the search on the HA app. It should succeed, which it didn't for me before the reset. Again, the app timed out while onboarding but seems to have successfully done so anyways.

The Thermo Control shows these values in HA: humidity, temperature, software upgrade, two identify buttons (but they seem to do the same?), battery status, and voltage.

The device shipped with firmware 3.3.0 which I updated to 3.5.0 immediately. This time the update ... UI took a long time to complete after 100%. I suspect that it timed out like five minutes afterwards with receiving the completion notification? That was a little odd. And in the mean time I did also update the second Thermos firmware so it's not like the HA hub was stuck or anything. But it seems to be good so whatever.

One more thing: To rename the device in the Home Assistant control panel you go to settings > devices > matter devices > and click any of them. Then at the top to the far right (in a large screen, that's not obvious) there's an edit button where you can change the name. That might be helpful ;)

Onboarding Eve Thermos to the Eve Thermo Control

Now, the point for the Eve Thermo Control was to have a thermostat that we could use to manually drive the radiators with.

Now, this device is newer than the Thermos. If this reddit thread is any indication, it launched about 4mo ago which would put it before them shipping an Eve Thermos with Matter. That said, this post (which looks to be by an Eve dev) does explicitly state that you can only onboard devices through the Eve app. This requires having a "Home" of some kind, so the app is a no-go for me regardless. One additional note: The Eve Thermo Control requires a "4th gen" thermo device, which I think ours are but ymmv.

There's no option for this in HA currently. In that post, the dev does state that HA has the ability to do it. Just, somebody has to create the UI controls for it. So that sounds like it may still come in the future. Heck, it may be something I could code myself. But it's all a bit daunting and I'm not a python dev to begin with.

I also realized that it may not matter as much as long as the radiators are set up. I may change my mind on that later.

So for now that's about it on the Thermo Control side of things. It runs, it measures, and it reports.

One thing I like about this thermostat is that it's usb battery driven, meaning I can charge it with USB-C. Almost all the temperature sensors I've seen so far are battery driven. Of course, this thing is more expensive than the average sensor so there's that.

Automation

Oh right we were doing this for a reason. Let's look at automation.

I want to setup the radiators to heat between 7am and 11pm during week days and 8am and 10pm on weekends. "Not heating" basically means a lower target temperature, since I never want to turn it off entirely.

In the control panel go to settings > automation and scenes. Here you can create a new automation with the blue button.

For the "when", I add a trigger > time and location > time. You can set a fixed time or base it on another sensor or whatever. I just use fixed time for now. There are no weekdays in this step, that's a little confusing at first but the weekdays are in the "and if" section. Click "add condition" > time and location > time. At the bottom of the section that now opens it says "weekdays", click it and select the weekdays you want to target. There's no "week / weekend" option but whatever. Finally, add an action > climate > set target temperature. Select the targets by clicking on the relevant buttons. Then set the target temperature (that input only shows up after selecting the device). You can select multiple devices. I'm not sure what happens when they have different capabilities though, you'll see for yourself when you try. And then press "save". That's it.

No control panel

Okay so there was one challenge left and I did not expect it to be that big of a deal but here we are: control the HA through Thread rather than wifi/eth.

I'll just give the bad news now: I've not found a way yet. None of the control panels currently available seem to target HA control over Thread. And I'm not sure if that's even going to be a thing at all.

On the other hand, there's plenty of "smart buttons", which can trigger actions in HA when activated, so there's no real reason why there couldn't be an integration that can communicate with a display of sorts for device control. Of course, somebody has to build it first; the device, the interface, and the HA integration. And that seems to be the missing link for now. Is that market so niche or am I missing something obvious here?

The only alternative way I've come up with so far is by having the HA create its own (hidden) wifi access point and point the wifi control panels to this wifi instead of my regular wifi. I mean, I guess that's an option but it's not ideal.

I've not been able to determine what it would take to connect to a Thread network from my computer, for example. Or if that's even possible, or how you would test this. Again, the keywords are hurting me more than helping. "Connect to network over Thread" just returns junk result for multi-threading or device specific guides to onboard a device to a Thread network. I've given up on that search for now. Maybe it's time I join a community and ask some experts on this. Maybe :p

Conclusion

Whew! That was a long one.

HA is running here for a few days now. I'm still happy with the results, despite the minor setback on a missing control panel.

I'm very happy that Eve turned out to be onboardable in HA without any other specific extra device, apple or otherwise. It seems to do what we want, although we still have to tweak it a little bit to figure out what our ideal temperatures are. That's more a case of calibration than anything else.

I am planning to extend this experiment to include automated sockets for lights and a sensor to detect whether anyone left the lights on in the garage.

I'm not planning to include automated locks. I would never put them on the outer doors and have no use case for indoors.

When we buy an EV I'll definitely look for a charging solution that can be connected to HA. But right now I have no idea.

Our solar panels are currently not connected to HA and I have no idea whether that's feasible at all. It might be but I have to do some research on that. I wouldn't mind it if we could plug in our water, heat, and electricity usage. I'd love some more granular usage feedback than "usage last month". But I suspect that this too will be non-trivial to complete. Not in a hurry, though.

I'm very happy that the industry is moving into the direction of Matter/Thread. It may still be a little bit early days but I think that won't take too long.