brians Posted July 24, 2023 Posted July 24, 2023 (edited) Added some Philips A19 Wiz bulbs today I got from local Home Depot to Home Assistant via Matter. Although there is a Wiz integration that is 1000000x easier to setup, it has an issue I didn't like with the way it presents RGB having a white brightness control slider also, which does not work well with other color wheel integrations. Also it gives me opportunity to experiment with Matter. 1. Connect Bulb to Wiz App 2. In app, select integrations, Matter and it will update and provide a QR code, a pairing code - copy this to clipboard. Press the button to start Matter pairing (have 15 min to do this) 3. On iPhone, go into Home Assistant, Add integration, go through the setup in app and enter the code manually. I now have in Home Assistant. I had to mess around a bit and I found that entering the code manually rather than trying to click on a device near me A19 Bulb, which did not seem to work reliably (sometimes I seen more than one bulb). Experiments... After getting the code, removed bulb from HA, and from the Wiz app, and attempted to setup using both Apple Home, and Home Assistant directly without the Wiz app... this was not successful. It seems that this Wiz Matter support requires their app to initiate pairing, and continue working. It also seems that these bulbs may be IPv4 still and not use IPv6 (it is questionable in my quick research whether or not Matter supports IPv4 devices, or in this case it just creates a new IPv6 address to use for Matter only in the background). The whole idea of Matter on IP is to be able to only use IPv6 addresses, not using up precious IPv4 address space reservations. After adding them with Matter to either Home Assistant or Apple Home, if I remove the bulb from Wiz app it resets the bulb, killing the Matter pairing making bulb no longer working. The app is definitely required to have the bulbs join to a matter network, and remain in. Unless I am missing something, or did something wrong! I will let them off though considering that these devices were upgraded to Matter,which is actually pretty nice for them to do (all 2021 and newer bulbs upgrade to Matter)! The big deal about this specific Wiz product and Matter support is for HomeKit users to be able to have them work now. I guess the fine print in the promise of Matter working with everything must have something in there where a manufacturer can still make this process rely upon their app, and device would become useless if their app ever stopped working. From other Matter devices I have read about, this seems like a disturbing trend! I also successfully added a bulb to Apple Home, then placed in pairing mode and added to Home Assistant via Matter using a different code provided by Apple Home... this worked well. Then I thought what happens if I remove from Apple Home so I removed it all selecting all integrations option and then it killed it in Home Assistant I think what is happening is it was using one of my Apple devices (HomePod mini, ATV4K Gen3) to allow this... maybe if I selected only remove from Apple Home it may have worked but the description of them was pretty vague in iPhone and I can see this becoming a confusing mess with having Matter devices relying on different hubs that not quite sure about what is connected to what! So what I ended up with is two Wiz A19 connected to Home Assistant via Matter. I made a light group in HA, and this replaced my Insteon lamplinc which was controlling two lamps in Living Room. I will test and see how reliable it is. I actually use the HA HomeKit integration to bring this light group back into Apple Home For $15 CAD per bulb in a 3-pack, this works out to be pretty good deal if they prove reliable. I still have mixed feelings of Matter though, I am starting to think it is just created to make devices compatible with "big three", and the manufacturers will still try to enforce you to rely on their apps and ecosystems. For example, in the Wiz app, can make nice scenes, even dynamic ones across your Wiz bulbs. Although they connect to Matter now, you cannot do any of this in there - you cannot even call a scene from Matter!!! Advanced features like power restore state also need the app (my hue lights in comparison I can set this in Zigbee parameter, even simple effects). Now you add some other brand Matter RGB bulbs, maybe Govee RGB that would have similar scenes/themes in their app... you cannot make these built-in scenes from across all different brands work together of course. So you are inclined to stay with one brand and one app to simplify things. I personally don't care since I don't really use those fancy scenes, and I am able to make scenes in HA that set bulbs different colours independent of mfg, and am sure you can do same in other hubs. But if I ever have to change a bulb or reset for some reason, I will have to use the manufacturer app. Maybe future devices will be better in years to come and less relying upon apps. Edited July 24, 2023 by brians 2
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