Controlling Matter devices with Apilio

General Build with Matter
1

I was wondering if you’ve had any experience with Matter devices and Apilio.

I’ve just bought a smart power plug that supports Matter over Thread, and I also bought a Matter controller for SmartLife.

I’ve successfully added the plug to SmartLife (and also to Apple Home and Amazon Alexa), and I can control it with SmartLife app (in addition to Apple Home and Amazon Alexa)

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However, the smart plug does not show any status in Apilio.

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I’ve tried to send custom commands, but they don’t work (no effect):

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I know that Apilio can’t do much if the manufacturer does not implement the standard commands, but I was wondering if there is any experience with controlling Matter devices in Apilio, as it seems to be the future.

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Hi @teknofilo ,
that’s very interesting! I have not yet found a Tuya Matter/Thread hub, so very keen to get one as well.
The fact that you see the device in Apilio is a good start. As there are no attributes or commands, the API currently doesn’t deliver any info about it. So we need to find out if that info is delivered differently or not at all or it is a bad implementation of the device.

I will be able to investigate once I have a Tuya Matter hub.

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I ordered it on November 18th and I’ve received it today, so just 9 days. Installation was very easy, Smartlife app detected it automatically. I can control the smart plug with Smartlife app both at home (WiFi) and away (cellular).

I was hoping that I could control the plug with Aplio via custom commands, but they have no effect. I tried both “switch” and “swith_1” and also “true” / “false”, but the smart plug does not change its status.

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4

A possible work-around might be as follows.

You can create virtual devices for Smart Life, and you can also create groups for devices within Smart Life, which then treats any action on one device as applying to all within the group. Apilio can certainly control virtual Tuya devices just like it does real ones. So if you grouped the Matter device with a standard virtual one within Smart Life, then any changes to one should (hopefully!) be reflected in the other. You can then just control the virtual device by Apilio, and (with a bit of luck) have any actions copied to the Matter device via Smart Life.

Virtual Tuya devices are created within the Tuya developer platform, just sign up for a free account if you have not already done so:

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5

That’s a very inventive workaround! Will it work?
Nevertheless, I certainly hope that we can have native support for Matter devices in Apilio.

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It is worth a try. Perhaps @teknofilo can have a go (I don’t have any Matter devices). Test it out grouping with a standard device first, and if that works you can go for the virtual device route.

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