Matter Woes

This is a Blaugust 2026 blog post. I have a moderately sized home automation network, running Home Assistant. I support devices on WiFi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter/Thread. I am using the Nabu Casa ZBT-2 Thread radio for these devices. Matter has not been a delightful experience. Yet, recently, when I’ve added new devices, I’ve opted for Matter. Initially, I was in pairing hell. New devices almost never added. But I got over that. Turns out that Thread requires IPv6 networking and I had that disabled because my upstream provider doesn’t support it. (Or maybe they do, but only through some VLAN or tunneling contortions.) Once I enabled IPv6 on the local network, that resolved smoothly. So now I’m left with two vexing problems. First, my Ikea MYGGBETT door/window sensor is stuck on firmware version 1.0.9 and won’t accept updates, even though 1.1.4 is available. I’ve seen some mention in the forums that moving to the beta version of the Matter server resolves this. But the device…