in the last week or so I have been entirely unable to successfully pair / commission new matter/thread router devices (mostly inovelli switches and eve outlets). I have a very robust mesh on OTBR / HA Yellow with 120+ devices and it just absolutely will not pair anything new. I get a "unable to pair" message and I have checked every setting in the iphone I know how to check. I was able to briefly get a few devices added by restoring an old OTBR instance from backup, but that quit also and caused its own issues. I can't tell if this is related to ios 26 or the latest otbr update or what. Anybody having similar issues, or have a fix?
#Pairing / Commissioning new Matter / Thread Devices into existing mesh at a standstill
clear furnace
night grove
Have you ever tried using HA Matter Server WebUI to add Thread device? You will need Bluetooth for this. It would be a quick way to know if it’s iOS issue or HA/OTBR issue
clear furnace
yes! thats a good idea, unfortunately it ALSO didn't work. it timed out. So, what does that mean?
Everybody seems down on the matter/thread stuff, but I've thought it was great, so far, and the mesh seems to work really well. My existing devices all work and do what they're supposed to do. This is some kind of home assistant or ios thing and not only can I not figure out for a week now, I don't even know who to ask or which logs to look at....
clear furnace
Figured it out. This was agony for days, but a simple fix. I tried everything I could think of to commission a device from the app, through the matter web ui using bluetooth on port 5580 - everything. Turns out I had to flip a few settings in my router related to ipv6. I’m not sure how the switches got flipped to start with, it was working fine, then it wasn’t, but when I changed my settings on my Araknis 310 router to Enable DHCP-PD, and Enable Flow Control - matter / thread pairing/commissioning started magically working again and hasn’t stopped. I suspect it was the DHCP setting, not flow control. IPv6 and multicast pass through were already enabled. I guess it is possible that I hit some number of devices that made DHCP-Pd necessary, or maybe I had it set originally and accidentally changed it, I don’t know. Regardless, keep an eye on anything related to IPv6. I figured out the problem when I tried to pair a device through homekit and got the same “unable” message. Figured it had to be a router setting.
pale falcon
hmm. support for DHCP-PD in thread border routers was only added in thread 1.4, which home assistant's otbr add-on does not implement. The OTBR addon relies purely on router announcements for a ULA subnet
so it's not DHCP-PD that would fix the issue itself, but perhaps enabling that fixed something else which was blocking required traffic.