After over a decade of seasonal use, my outdoor holiday lights controller didn’t wake up when I brought it down from the attic this weekend. I knew I wanted to replace it with something that worked with Home Assistant, but wasn’t sure what to go with. I have had a lot of luck lately with some Zigbee devices around the house, and I love having Home Assistant be in charge rather than some other cloud integration. However there didn’t seem to be much to choose from Zigbee wise.

Somehow I ended up looking at a Matter enabled device, specifically the TP-Link - Tapo Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug with Matter. I am really pleased with how adding it to Home Assisant worked! I have the Home Assistant Yellow, so I have all of the hardware needed for that. Once I realized I needed my phone on the 2.4 GHz WiFi to provision the TP-Link device, it was smooth as it could be. I never installed a TP-Link app, nor created an account in their cloud.

The Matter dream might be alive after all?!