Implementing the Matter Protocol

Using the Arduino Nano Matter or Sparkfun Thing Plus Matter Boards

- Brian Millier

Following up on his earlier articles on Alexa connectivity, Brian investigates using the Matter protocol with IoT boards from Arduino and Sparkfun.

I've been building IoT projects lately that can be integrated with the Amazon Alexa Echo smart speakers in my home. I find the Alexa voice recognition capabilities to be excellent, and it's easy to set up routines for the various sensors and controlled devices that I've connected to it. Up until recently, the projects that I built for this purpose were only compatible with Alexa by virtue of their being an emulation of a commercial product (see my articles in issues 412 and 414).

However, when Arduino announced its Nano Matter development board, it promised to provide compatibility with my Alexa devices using a combination of the Thread and Matter protocols. This seemed to offer a higher level of integration than I had been able to achieve with my projects, which merely emulated some popular commercial devices (i.e., Philips Hue lightbulbs).

The Arduino Nano Matter board achieves Matter compatibility by using an RF-enabled MCU by Silicon Labs: the MGM240S. I use the Arduino IDE regularly and felt that having an Arduino-based Matter library available would simplify the programming process considerably. Before the Nano Matter board was available to customers, Arduino ported Silicon Lab's Matter library to the Arduino platform. I'm using Arduino IDE version 2.3.4 and downloaded version 1.0 of the board support package (BSP) for the Nano Matter board. I was able to compile several of their example sketches with no errors displayed.