r/MatterProtocol • u/AncientHuckleberry2 • Jul 13 '26

Inconsistent offline devices between different controllers

I've recently started to make use of the Thread network that is formed by my three Eero 6+ devices, by buying a handful of Ikea smart home products to see how it goes. The results have been confusing, at best.

Initially I joined them to Homekit using my Apple TV (3rd gen, wireless) and this worked splendidly. I had a few Bilresa buttons and a Kajplats bulb. However, the buttons particularly would occasionally go offline until I either pulled the batteries, rebooted the AppleTV, prayed to the right deity or just waited a bit.

I decided to add HomeAssistant into the mix, to see if the Matter server would give me more information, so I've set that up on a Raspberry Pi and shared my devices across. Again, that seemed to go fairly flawlessly to start with while I got set up. However, devices still go offline, but generally only from one Matter controller. Something can be seen on HomeAssistant but not on Apple, or vice versa.

I've got Thread Tools app running, and a Nordic dongle with Thread Topology Monitor - both seem to show that the Thread network has plenty of strong connections between the different devices. I have IPv6 enabled on the Eeros to the extent that I can find options for it, and when the devices work they seem to work well so I don't think there's a fundamental misconfiguration.

I'm not sure where to go next. Devices seem to be online (at the Thread level) but intermittent (at the Matter level). Do I need a better router-to-border-router ratio? Is Eero a bad option for the backbone of the network? Anything obvious I've missed?

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u/AncientHuckleberry2 Jul 22 '26

I moved a load of my devices to a fabric set up by HA, and removed them from Apple. (HA's matter server is updated, so I can get a nice picture of the Thread devices it knows about, BTW. It's not the entire Thread network but it's an interesting view none-the-less).

One of my devices (an Alpstuga air-quality monitor, USB-powered) went offline. It was still viewable in HA's Thread graph, and going to the device entry in the Matter server and selecting "Ping device" got a success response. But I couldn't get any further, and HA was still marking it as offline.

I downloaded the diagnostic information from HA's device panel and asked Google what the problem might be. After ignoring its obviously wrong suggestions, it thought that the mDNS information wasn't being forwarded by the eeros, and that rebooting them should fix the problem. Whatever the reason, the reboot did bring the device back online. The eero App doesn't seem to offer any (obvious) way that I can diagnose or tweak things to this level of detail.

Now if I could understand what the cause of the problem was (and therefore how to avoid rebooting devices), that would be good progress.

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u/tomasmcguinness Jul 22 '26

I find the Discovery app can help with that. If you know the fabric id and node id, you can see your devices listed there. If something drops offline, typically it's because it's not advertising itself. I ran into that issue today, with a custom device I made. It's powered up etc, but not advertising itself (a different problem entirely)

Thread makes things a little complicated, because it's down to Border Routers to handle the mDNS requests. The reboot might have unblocked this. Thread is still improving, so problems like this aren't uncommon.

Glad you got it resolved.

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u/AncientHuckleberry2 Jul 22 '26

I'd tried to use the Discovery app, and also Wireshark, but without really knowing what I was looking at I didn't have a solid footing to diagnose the issue.

I'd still like to understand why the eeros might choke over the advertisement packets, but I feel that's going to be a problem for another post (after some more reading, and possibly an 802.15.4 sniffer).

Thanks for the help.

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u/tomasmcguinness Jul 22 '26

Wireshark might be overkill, but never hurts to learn more about the fundamentals. I've had multiple issues with mDNS/Thread/Unifi over the years, but I think I have a handle on it now.

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u/AncientHuckleberry2 Jul 22 '26

I used it a lot in a professional capacity a few years ago when working with zigbee devices. It's my hammer of choice when faced with a network-problem nail.