I have successfully added an IKEA's cheap matter over thread device (Bilresa switch) to the inexpensive (ca £20) Aqara M100 Thread border router and accessed its output in Node Red via @sammachin/node-red-matter-controller on a raspberry pi Zero2w running 64bit piOS PixieI.
- I used the Aqara App on an iPhone to setup the IKEA Bilresa on the Aqara M100 .
All that is needed in order to automate the Thread routing of the rpi to the IKEA device on the Thread network is to add accept-ra: true and dhcp6: true to the Netplan YAML file in /etc/netplan/under the wlan0 section .
- The actual address for Netplan configuration file is found by
ls /etc/netplan/
You will likely see a file named something like 90-NM-e64bd22a...yaml or 01-netcfg.yaml.
- Open that specific file
sudo nano /etc/netplan/<90-NM...yaml>
Addaccept-ra: trueanddhcp6: trueunder the wlan0 interface.
YAML
network:
version: 2
wifis:
wlan0:
renderer: NetworkManager
match: {}
dhcp4: true
dhcp6: true # <--- Add this for IPv6 support
accept-ra: true # <--- Add this to catch the Thread routes
access-points:
"PLUSNET-37AW2T":
auth:
...
Reboot the rpi for the changes to take effect.
The Matter Pairing Code for the device (e.g Bilresa) in the Aqara App can now be used for the Commissioning in a Device Management Node of the node-red-matter-controller.
If the initial commissioning of the device in Node Red with the Matter Pairing code fails, can sometimes help to press a button on the Bilresa to wake things up so-to-speak
Limitations
While one can detect the keypress of the individual buttons on the Bilresa in Node Red, differentiation of keypresses as single, double or long as detected in the Aqara App appears not to be discernible.
If in the Node Red there is an error in the handling of the output because of e.g. inappropriate settings used in one of the Matter nodes, then the rpi may crash such that the json file for the flow needs to be removed and one has to start afresh with an empty flow workspace mv /home/pi/.node-red/flows.json /home/pi/.node-red/flows_broken.json.
Folllowing crashes you will have to use a new pairing code, if that fails in Node Red Commissioning
commissionDevice 01898118552 BILRESA
2026-02-09 17:52:04.026 ERROR Controller~missioner Commissioning step 7.1: OperationalCredentials.Certificates failed with error: Commission error for "addNoc": 9, undefined ... Aborting commissioning
then you may need to
- Clean the Pi's Memory
- Stop Node-RED:
node-red-stop - Wipe the Matter folder:
rm -rf /home/pi/.matter - Start Node-RED:
node-red-start
or failing that
- Factory Reset the IKEA Switch and rejoin the Thread Network, etc , i.e. start afresh.