Matter for Makers: integrating home-built IoT devices into your Smart Home

In October 2022, the Matter 1.0 standard was released. The vision of Matter is to have one standard for home automation, where before many different standards existed (HomeKit, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, Alexa, etc).

(and yes, there is an ironclad law on the internet that anyone writing that sentence has to then display the following XKCD).

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(and when we all stop laughing, we realise that we are very happy that the developers of USB didn’t get discouraged by this…)

In this (partly hand-on) talk I will try to explain what Matter and Thread is, what the big deal is, and how it’s useful for Makers (=us). I will try to answer the question if you should make your next home project Matter or not, and how I see the future of Matter. And I will show some Matter in action!

Then during the second hour we should get a bit more hands-on: We will look at what’s happening on a network level, and run a small Matter Controller. I will give you some tools and pointers to get started, to get some of your own Matter things working; and maybe, depending on time, we’ll manage to get some Matter stuff running.

## Level of the talk / workshop

I want to give a talk / workshop that is open to everyone, however there is a lot to cover on this subject, so we will need to move fast. This is because although the Matter protocol is open and free, it’s quite complex. I expect the first hour will be interesting for anyone with an interest in technology to follow, for the second hour everyone is welcome to stay but it may go a bit too far in-depth if you don’t have experience with network protocols, C and embedded systems. Then again, sometimes the best way to learn to swim, is being thrown into the deep end.

## Registration

In a previous version I suggested that I wanted pre-registration so that we could set up some stuff, however this is overkill. However if you want to be maximum-prepared, please follow the Hackademy thread.