Matter is an open standard that allows IoT and smart home devices to communicate with each other over different networking technologies. Many high-profile companies have bought into Matter and promise to begin offering Matter-enabled devices in the near future. As a result, we should hopefully see the end of vendor-locked smart home ecosystems.
You can recreate the demo shown in the video by following the guide here:
Unlike ZigBee and Z-Wave, Matter exists almost entirely in the Application layer of the OSI Model, which means that it relies on other underlying networking technologies to provide connectivity at the lower levels. At this time, Matter can run on top of WiFi, Ethernet, and Thread. Matter devices are able to communicate with other networks, such as ZigBee and Z-Wave, but a bridge or border router is necessary to enable this process.
Matter uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to commission new devices onto the network. Ideally, the commissioning process relies on a vendor-provided smartphone application that the end user employs to communicate with the device that wants to join the Matter network. In addition to helping the device join the network, the commissioning process provides the required cryptography keys to the end device, as all communication on the Matter network is encrypted with AES-128.
The Matter data model is broken down into devices, nodes, endpoints, and clusters. A device refers to the physical device, such as a smart light bulb or thermostat. Each device can have multiple nodes, which are groups of addressable functionality. These groups consist of individual endpoints where each endpoint has an IPv6 address on the network and maintains a list of features that endpoint provides.
The endpoints contain servers and/or clients. A server endpoint can consist of attribute, event, and command features. Attributes store data, events log state changes, and commands offer some form of functionality, such as telling a smart bulb to toggle on and off. Clients can talk to server features across the Matter network.
In the latter half of the video, we demonstrate Matter functionality using two Silicon Labs boards and a Raspberry Pi 4.
