SONOFF Announces Matter Support — If You Self-Host eWeLink's CUBE OS
If you've a Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, or compatible NAS handy, your SONOFF gear can be upgraded to Matter right now.
Home automation and Internet of Things (IoT) specialist SONOFF has announced official support for the Matter vendor-neutral interoperability standard — providing you self-host a copy of eWeLink's CUBE OS, that is.
"Now all your SONOFF devices work with Matter easily," the company announced this week. "Bringing SONOFF Wi-Fi & Zigbee devices into the Matter ecosystem is now official and simple. Works seamlessly with Matter platforms like Apple Home and Google Home."
Originally known as Project Connected Home over IP, Matter — developed by a consortium formed of Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and what was known at the time as the Zigbee Alliance — aims to address the fragmentation of the smart home connectivity sector. Any Matter device can be connected to any Matter network and controlled with any Matter-compliant software — regardless of the manufacturer of the device, hub, or app. In some cases, adding Matter support is as simple as a firmware upgrade; in others, it requires new hardware.
In SONOFF's case, it's somewhere between the two. The company's existing smart home products won't receive an upgrade to native Matter support, but will instead be connected to Matter networks using either a dedicated Matter bridge — or a self-hosted copy of eWeLink's CUBE OS, with a Zigbee radio dongle if required.
"eWeLink CUBE OS is a free, open, self-hosted local software system designed to upgrade the smart devices already in your home," eWeLink explains of the latter option. "It allows many eWeLink-supported Wi-Fi devices, such as SONOFF products, to be directly bridged into the Matter network without any additional hardware, enabling them to work simultaneously with Apple Home, SmartThings, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Home Assistant, and other Matter-compatible platforms."
The software is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 ranges of single-board computers, eWeLink explains, or can be installed on network attached storage (NAS) devices from Synology or UGREEN or on other machines via a virtual machine running in VirtualBox, VMware, or Hyper-V. For Wi-Fi-based devices, no other hardware is required; for Zigbee-based devices, a USB Zigbee radio dongle is needed to connect them to the CUBE OS server and out onto the rest of the network.
Instructions for installing CUBE OS are available on the eWeLink website; releases are available on GitHub under an unspecified license, with no public source code availability.