What is Matter? Unifying IoT Devices for the Smart Home | Digi-Key Electronics

Matter is an open standard that allows IoT and smart home devices to communicate with each other over different networking technologies. Many high-profile companies have bought into Matter and promise to begin offering Matter-enabled devices in the near future. As a result, we should hopefully see the end of vendor-locked smart home ecosystems.

You can recreate the demo shown in the video by following the guide here:

Unlike ZigBee and Z-Wave, Matter exists almost entirely in the Application layer of the OSI Model, which means that it relies on other underlying networking technologies to provide connectivity at the lower levels. At this time, Matter can run on top of WiFi, Ethernet, and Thread. Matter devices are able to communicate with other networks, such as ZigBee and Z-Wave, but a bridge or border router is necessary to enable this process.

Matter uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to commission new devices onto the network. Ideally, the commissioning process relies on a vendor-provided smartphone application that the end user employs to communicate with the device that wants to join the Matter network. In addition to helping the device join the network, the commissioning process provides the required cryptography keys to the end device, as all communication on the Matter network is encrypted with AES-128.

The Matter data model is broken down into devices, nodes, endpoints, and clusters. A device refers to the physical device, such as a smart light bulb or thermostat. Each device can have multiple nodes, which are groups of addressable functionality. These groups consist of individual endpoints where each endpoint has an IPv6 address on the network and maintains a list of features that endpoint provides.

The endpoints contain servers and/or clients. A server endpoint can consist of attribute, event, and command features. Attributes store data, events log state changes, and commands offer some form of functionality, such as telling a smart bulb to toggle on and off. Clients can talk to server features across the Matter network.

In the latter half of the video, we demonstrate Matter functionality using two Silicon Labs boards and a Raspberry Pi 4.

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00:00 - Intro
01:08 - Matter Overview
02:53 - Matter Data Model
05:40 - Matter Network Topology
08:04 - Demo Hardware
09:11 - Configure Raspberry Pi Bluetooth
12:03 - Set Up Thread Network
12:12 - Commission Matter Accessory Device
15:34 - Remotely Control LED Over Matter
16:35 - Conclusion

[AdityaMehendale]

Trust Shawn to take a complex topic and break it down to bite-sized, easy-to-follow chunks :) Thanks!!

[mustang]

Matter is starting to become mainstream but it seems there are a number of facts people don't know and aren't told but really should be.

[RogerTannous]

Great introduction from Shawn, but it seems a little bit concerning when it comes to getting devices to connect. How will engineers design systems based on Matter (and Thread) and ensure almost no human intervention is required. Will they suffer disconnections when unattended power cycling occurs ?

[qcnck]

I hope I'm wrong, but what I can gather is that Thread (a word that implies connecting things) is a connection methodology, and Matter (which would imply an object) is also a connection methodology. What a mess. A really complicated mess.
Millions of words in the English language, and this is what they come up with!

[pumpkingal]

It uses Ethernet, WiFi, BLE, Thread. But why not LoRa too?

[mnemonicator]

This kind of compatibility is already available in the market for long period if time and known as KNX, I don’t see any advantages with matter.

[richardautry]

Get your facts straight! You seem to have gotten one little fact wrong, it wasn't Hirohito who didn't want to back down, it was the military leadership. It wasn't until the Nagasaki bomb that the military leadership agreed to ask the Emperor for his advice, that he pointed out that the war was going badly and the people were suffering too much.

[SolarizeYourLife]

You failed to tell all of us, that we actually need a matter hub that actually works locally especially when the Internet goes down!!! 👎🏽😡

[Timhogs]

You and YouTube have a lot of nerve thinking I'll be willing to sit through a 17 minute advertisement to watch a five minute video.

[dbm]

Could it get more complicated ?
It’s ok, A I will handle it