Following on from my Matter Bridge nodes a couple of months ago I've now released the first version of my Matter Controller.
These nodes are designed to allow you to control real physical matter devices in your home network like Light Bulbs, Smart Plugs, Switches and Sensors.
Please read the README and the read it again! I've gone with a slightly lower level approach than with the Bridge so you are dealing with elements of the actual matter protocol, The advantage of doing this though is that as a controller it will support ANY and ALL Matter devices and feature without me having to create a ton of config and UI.
It "should" also be more future proof to new device types as an when they appear.
There's still some work to do, take particular note of the limitations around Bluetooth and commisioning today, adding BLE support so that you can setup a brand new out of the box device is top of the todo list.
I've tested this with a few different devices, several lightbulbs, some Thread based sensors and a Button along with some virtual devices created with my Matter Bridge nodes.
I would advise against running the controller on the same node-red machine as the bridge, as you may get strange results, I'll do some more testing of this soon.
https://github.com/sammachin/node-red-matter-controller
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Wow that was quick!
Its more that I've not tested the Controller and Bridge on the same machine yet, I'll hopefully get to that tomorrow or over the weekend and then be able to provide proper advice.
In theory it should work, indeed I intend to use this to expose matter devices through my bridge up to Alexa and Apple with it eventually.
The scenario that I think might be weird is trying to control a virtual device on the same machine but I can't really see why someone would want to do that other than for playing..
I take it that you mean the SAME device as a virtual & real device. I have acquired a real matter device to play with but I have also started using your bridge nodes for zigbee devices to run under Google & Alexa, so I would have real & virtual devices running on the same Pi.
I have questions about those nodes that I will raise separately
I'm not certain that it won't just work, but I've not tested that scenario and there's potentially several variables in play so I was just advising against it at this stage, but if you want to experiement and see what happens (accepting that things might break!) please do and feedback your results
Had a chance to do some tests with both Controller and Bridge on the same Node-RED instance this morning.
Things seem to work fine, so ignore my previous warnings about not mixing them, I actually had a bridged node configured in apple home that was then controlling a real matter lightbulb from the control node and it all worked nicely.
The only thing you can't do is use the Node-RED Controller to control local Node-RED Bridged devices, which is what I suspected and I don't have any plans to fix that as I don't see any practical scenario where you would want to do that.
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