Matter bridges

[Unnamedi]

@NelsonSilva

This new bridge would be even more interesting if SONOFF could create something similar to the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, but with Matter Bridge support. The Aeotec hub can accept external drivers to make devices from other brands compatible with the system, which is a great concept. However, it falls short because it does not support — and according to the company, is not expected to support in the near future — the Matter Bridge feature.

For those already using Home Assistant, etc., they shouldn’t need to worry about MatterBridge, etc., using the newly released Zigbee antennas.

However, for advanced platform users, it would be interesting to have access to creating drivers for their devices, similar to SmartThings or Z2M, where they could create a driver, upload it to a repository, and have it added for everyone, or use it for themselves!

@NelsonSilva

On the other hand, releasing a new bridge that supports external drivers and also acts as a Matter Bridge would allow the development team to focus less on directly supporting third-party devices. Instead, that responsibility could be delegated to the community or even to other brands through driver development.

Now we’re running into more complex technical aspects of the Matter bridge, something that isn’t very simple to do! Especially since I imagine this new hub with a bridge needs to be certified, and being certified means it has to follow criteria and rules! And Sonoff doesn’t have all the devices; for example, it doesn’t have Cinerene doorbells, smoke detectors, gate sensors, etc.! That would create a very high level of complexity in implementing and translating third-party drivers for the bridge! That’s why SmartThings doesn’t do this! The plugin that does this for HA and Z2M has a fairly large community around it, developing and helping hard! And even then, not everything runs perfectly!

@NelsonSilva

I’m curious what is the percentage of users that use CubeOs standalone.

I would say it’s low-cost! However, I would say it’s promising for people who don’t want anything complex!

If it became a little more like Homey, for example, with Flows, etc., it would be interesting, and the implementation of drivers would also be very interesting! I wouldn’t say it should be a Matter Bridge at its core, but being able to create drivers and integrations with other platforms would be very interesting!