Matter Bulbs Not Reconnecting when power removed

[jshafferman28]

The problem

OREiN Matter Smart Light Bulbs have issues "coming back online" if they have been shut off at a switch. They come back instantly into Google's Matter Fabric.

Some bulbs come back up right away, others take 5+ minutes, others require a restart.

What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?

core-2023.11.2

What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?

No response

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

Integration causing the issue

Matter

Link to integration documentation on our website

No response

Diagnostics information

No response

Example YAML snippet

No response

Anything in the logs that might be useful for us?

No response

Additional information

No response

[valerie16901]

I have the exact same problem

I had to downgrade to core_2023 10.5 and Matter server 4.9.0, nobody seems to be looking at this, did you found a solution?

[the-rajsingh1]

Same problem also with the OREiN Matter Smart Light Bulbs, any progress?

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[marcelveldt]

They will reconnect but that will take several minutes till even hours. Also these bulbs are not very smart and have not implemented a proactive case resubscription where it stores the case subscription to the matter fabric(s) and restores it as soon as it comes back online so the only way is the controller doing slow polling to see if they''re back online. I would replace these lights with lights that do proactively resubscribe or make sure the power can not be removed.

I believe the other platforms (Like Google Home and Apple Home) just use their own mdns discovery implementation to detect a device back online on the network while marked offline and restore the subscription. We're using the SDK default implementation which is still poll based and the operational node discovery part is not implemented here. This is not a big issue for devices that proactively restore the CASE subscription but for devices like this Orein WiFi bulb that becomes a problem and you'll have to wait whatever timeout the sdk decides to use for the poll attempts.

We're still waiting until the operational node discovery part has been implemented in the SDK but if takes too long we might decide to also implement our own mdns discovery. For now I consider this a feature request and not a bug report.

Temporary solution: Don't remove power from these bulbs.

[marcelveldt]

BTW: This worked somewhat better in earlier releases of the matter server because we had a workaround in place which causes some other side effects. We removed it as we think we should not fix device specific issues, especially not while Matter is in this early stage. The device manufacturer can just easily implement a proactive case resubscription and release a firmware update.

[don-reba]

Sorry to barge in, but I might have the same problem and find the response discouraging.

We removed it as we think we should not fix device specific issues

Does taking such a position not make Home Assistant an inferior home integration product? I would understand it if it was a standards compliance benchmark, but devices are never going to have perfect software — hardware manufacturers are notoriously bad at this — and it is up to HA to be as robust as possible.

[marcelveldt]

We are going to fix this by implementing our own operational node discovery (just like Google and Apple who use their own OS-level mdns discovery for this). Currently we are just relying on the SDK for this which default implementation is a (forever) increasing poll interval. So it can take many hours for a bulb to come back online of it was removed from power for a longer period of time and the hardware itself does not support proactive case resubscriptions.

So please be patient while we create a workaround for this. In the meanwhile do not power down your Matter smart devices (or accept that it can take a while before its back online) or just buy devices that implement the proactive case resubscriptions.

[hoppel118]

@marcelveldt Are we missing proactive case resubscription on Nanoleaf Essentials Matter over Thread bulbs too?

[marcelveldt]

@marcelveldt Are we missing proactive case resubscription on Nanoleaf Essentials Matter over Thread bulbs too?

Nanoleaf implemented proactive case resubscription in their firmware version 3.6

[marcelveldt]

Good news! This one is fixed in the new matter server release that will be published today.