Matter Shades Controllable through Hubitat, oddly Not through Matter TBR/Hub

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1

I have some Matter over Thread (EveMotion) shades in my home. They've been finicky, to say the least. However, in general, controlling them through Hubitat has been reasonably reliable. I have found, however, that the issues I have with the shades all seem to be stemming from the TBR/Matter hub which, in my case, is an Amazon Echo, not with Hubitat.

More specifically, I use voice commands through Alexa to control the shades, along with some scheduled routines in Hubitat. When I use voice commands, because the shades are paired directly to an Echo Hub, I was relying on direct control. For example...I would just speak "Alexa Close Bedroom Shade" and, normally, the shade would be closed by Alexa/the Echo Hub - no Hubitat involved in that action. That's what has been flaking out constantly. In fact, most recently, one of my shades completely disappeared from the Alexa app so, attempting to close that shade by an Alexa voice command just stopped working. But here's the confusing part...even though that shade appears to have been lost altogether by Alexa/the Echo hub, I can still control it through Hubitat. So, it's clearly still connected, but the Alexa app doesn't think it is so, I can't control it directly through Alexa.

To get around this flakey behaviour, I've now got "routines" setup in the Alexa app which allow me to use an Alexa voice command - Alexa Close Shade - but instead of letting Alexa natively close the shade, I'm switching on a virtual switch in Hubitat to then trigger a Hubitat command to close the shade. That works very reliably.

It seems very counter-intuitive to me that bouncing from Alexa over to Hubitat to control a Matter shade connected directly to an Echo hub is the only way to reliably control it. Clearly all the shades are still connected to the Echo hub, or they wouldn't be controllable. So, I'm assuming the issues are with the Alexa app, not necessarily the thread border router (Echo hub).

Curious if anyone out there has Matter devices in their ecosystem connected through an Echo Hub as their TBR and, if so, what your experience has been. I've heard using an Apple HomePod at a TBR is a much more reliable solution, but having Alexa/Echo already in my ecosystem, I was hoping to avoid adding a third protocol/network (HomeKit) just to have reliable Matter device control. If, however, going Apple is the best solution, I'm willing to make that change.

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I am currently testing a matter motor with my Leviosa shades. You can read about my experience in this thread.

Basically after initial install it wouldn't work. I had one TBR in a Echo show 10. I added a second TBR with a Echo plus that was in my shop and moved it up to the house. As soon as I added that second TBR it's been working flawlessly. I have since added a third, I replaced a 1st generation ECHO show I had with a new Echo show 8.

It's been almost 2 weeks now and the shade has not missed a beat. Like you I mostly use voice commands and a few automations to control them. I lost internet yesterday for a bit, and while it was out I did some testing. I, of coarse, could not control the shade via voice commands but my dashboard in HE worked fine. I don't really look at the Alexa app very often but the few times I have the shade is showing and I can control it via the Alexa app. Just checked it and looks ok. Only anomaly, which I noted in the other thread, is I notice in the Alexa app it says the shade is connected via a Echo device that does not have a TBR in it. Does yours do that?

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Thanks @terminal3. The answer to your final question is "yes"...another anomaly I noticed. A couple of my shades show as connected to one of my smaller Echo Shows which are not TBRs which struck me as odd.

When you added a second Echo TBR to your ecosystem, did you do anything else, or did you simply plug it in? I'm not exactly keen to buy another hub but, if for some reason, that's the key to better reliability, I'll certainly consider it. Signal coverage, however, should not be an issue for me. This is my city home and it's a single level, and only about 1300 square feet. The Echo Hub is in the living room, about 10 feet from the two living room shades, and about 25 feet, give or take, through a wall on either side, to my first and second bedroom shades. Might the second Echo TBR be more about redundancy and less about signal strength?

Overall, I guess I'm just a bit disappointed. Everything I had read up to the time I purchased my Matter shades led me to believe that Matter was the future...reliable, stable, etc. It's been anything but that.

This is beyond my level of understanding, but is a Thread Border Router a hardware feature, or purely software? Any chance a future Hubitat would include a TBR and I could have a cleaner network with all my devices connected to a single hub?

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Nothing to do but plug them in. In the thread I linked to above @ogiewon mentions an app in this post you should check out if you can.

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For a device to take on the role of being a Thread Border Router, the device needs two things:

  1. A hardware Thread Radio
  2. Thread Border Router software

Not all Amazon Echo devices include a Thread Radio:

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Installed the app recommended in the post to which @terminal3 referred me - thank you. It shows my Echo Hub as the only TBR in my network, running firmware 1.1.1. And it seems, according to that post, that other Echo devices without a TBR can still act as controllers, which would explain why some of my shades appear to be connected to a different Echo Show.

At this point, doesn't seem like there's much I can do to improve the reliability of direct control through the Alexa app. For now, I've created routines to control all my shades which simply kick off apps on Hubitat via virtual switches, given that seems to be the most reliable.