After going backwards and forwards on different home automation radio options, I eventually settled on an SMLight SLZB-MR4 Zigbee / Thread / PoE Ethernet / USB adapter.
I chose the SLZB-MR4 because my Home Assistant server is all the way in one corner of my house, and I wanted the option to centrally place the radios, and that doing that with power supplied over ethernet made it really easy to put it wherever the nearest RJ45 was.
The SLZB-MR4 offers two primary radios - they are:
- Silicon Labs EFR32MG26
- Texas Instruments CC2674P10
Having dual radios was important, so I could have one running Zigbee and one running Matter over Thread. Both radios can run either protocol, but searches I did suggested that the TI was better for Zigbee, and Silicon Labs was better for Thread.
Zigbee was pretty easy to get going. Using Zigbee really easy to get going - and I haven't had a problem at all with it. It was a bit fiddly to get the network radio parameters just right - Home Assistant expects by default that the radio will be connected via USB rather than over the network. A slow and/or congested network can also cause radio protocol timing issues, however I have a gigabit network, and the maximum baud rate that the radios support with the beta firmware is 480kilobaud.
Thread, on the other hand, was a right royal pain. Under the hood, Matter uses IPv6. I had tried to multi-home my HAOS instance between two VLANs, my general LAN, and my dedicated IoT LAN, and HA and Matter/Thread really did not like that.
In the end, I banished my HAOS instance to just the IoT VLAN which, at this time, can still be reached from the general VLAN.
Once HAOS and HA wasn't multihomed, Matter worked a lot more smoothly onboarding devices. As my ISP supports IPv6, and I have IPv6 enabled through to my VLANs at this time, I disabled the NAT64 option in HA setup.
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