Home Assistant + Matter Bridge: Smarter Connections, Fewer Headaches

Voice control isn’t mission-critical in my house, but when it breaks, you’d think my coffee maker was plotting against me. My smart home consists of two primary systems - Home Assistant and Google. I configured them to work together through Google Cloud Platform, and everything worked great… until it didn’t a few months ago. Because of dad life (and because duct tape only goes so far in the digital world), time and the fix had slipped away from me.

Scrolling Reddit, I stumbled across a hidden gem that promised to ditch Google Cloud headaches and make everything play nice locally. It simplifies everything. I wanted to share it with you to give props to the developer and to help others in the same boat.

Home Assistant Matter Hub

Gotta give props to the OG - Home-Assistant-Matter-Hub

I’m not going to go much into Home Assistant yet, but it is a solid smart home platform that allows you to integrate all kinds of technologies in one place. This not only includes sensors and other hardware, but also software. They offer all kinds of official integrations and add-ons, but a lot of the magic happens by the hands of the community.

This open source add-on not only saved me a lot of time (and probably a few extra gray hairs) by not having to set up and maintain a project in GCP, but it lets me share everything from Home Assistant to my Google smart home devices locally. Yes, LOCALLY. This is a huge plus for me and other smart home enthusiasts, because the more data I keep within my home the better.

It works by simulating a bridge to connect all of your entities from Home Assistant to any Matter-compatible controller. This can be Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home. If you’re a wild one and couldn’t decide on one, you can even configure it to work with multiple controllers! There are a few limitations, but it has worked for everything I need.

I’ll walk you through all it takes to add it to Home Assistant and start sharing entities with Google Home. You could knock all this out by the time you brew a cup of coffee to start your next project.

Installation

As always, check out the official docs for the add-on.

You can either run this as a docker container or as an add-on within Home Assistant. We’ll take the latter route.

1. Open your Home Assistant UI
2. Navigate to the Add-Ons area by navigating to Settings -> Add-Ons -> Add-On Store
3. On the top right, click the More ellipses and select Repositories
4. We’re adding a new repository, so at the bottom of the modal in the Add field enter https://github.com/t0bst4r/home-assistant-addons and click Add
5. Close the modal
6. Refresh the Add-On Store and install the Add-On
7. Navigate to the Add-On page, configure how you want it. I toggled on Start on boot, Watchdog, and Show in sidebar

Now to make the magic happen.

Play Nice and Share

Before we get started, let me tell you that if you don’t configure something in the new bridge settings then Home Assistant will share EVERYTHING. Google Home was flooded with all kinds of devices - lights, sensors, automations, even things I forgot I had connected. It was like opening a junk drawer and realizing half of it is smart now.

In the configuration for the bridge, you have an include array and an exclude array. I highly suggest that you configure one of them. I decided to include devices by labels, but I’ll get more on that later. Please check the bridge configuration docs for detailed instructions on how to configure these settings. Now… let’s get started.

1. Navigate to the add-on web UI
2. Click Create New Bridge
3. Give it a name, leave the port the same, provide a country code if you need, configure your include and exclude settings, and finally change any additional settings below. I made sure not to include hidden entities
4. Click Save and it should provide you with a QR code. Keep this up
5. Navigate to your Google Home app on your phone, go to your devices tab, tap Add. Now tap Matter-enabled device and scan the QR code that the add-on presented to you
6. Watch your device list fill with everything shared from Home Assistant!

Tag Me In

I wanted to share my approach for filtering what I wanted to share with Google Home. As of right now, I really only want to share my light switches and door locks. I already have my TVs and thermostats on Google Home. I don’t need anything else right now, but I’m sure with all my tinkering I will in the future.

So to make things easy for me, I decide to only include entities with a particular tag matter_available. Instead of messing with the configuration for the add-on every time and knowing how to find the information I need to configure things properly, I’m able to include and exclude items at will by just adding a label to any supported entity by that entity’s settings. Easy peasy, just like labeling your kid’s lunchbox. But this time it makes Google behave.

It’s an easy way manage what I share, and I can always find a list of everything by filter by label on the Entities page.

Wrapping Up

It’s a quick article for something with potentially big gains for your smart home. It’s one of those small tweaks that feels like a superpower - kind of like finding fresh batteries in the junk drawer on the first try. I’m sure my daughter will love turnings lights on and off once she can pronounce “Hey Google” a bit better. Though honestly, I may regret giving her that much power 😆.

I wanted to again give a shout out to the developer and wanted to share love for the open source community! Share the article with your fellow smart home geeks and let me know what you’re using your voice to control in the comments below!