THIRDREALITY Smart Bridge MZ1 -Zigbee to Matter Connectivity, Compatible with Google Home, Apple Home, SmartThings, Home Assistant etc.

Works beautifully, saves my Sengled bulbs from obsolescence, and local control = no outages
Originally I got one of these as a customer-support proposed improvement to controlling my Third Reality sensors & switches, and later added 3R smart blinds as well. It worked for that, bypassing 3R’s cloud services which seemed unreliable. I had little to no trouble setting it up and connecting it to Alexa and Home Assistant – and performance was dramatically improved.But it gets even better, elevating it up to 6-star territory. It also connects to my Sengled bulbs and plugs, after the Sengled platform started falling apart. With it, I was able to add all my bulbs and plugs, no problem. The Sengled devices actually work better with the bridge than 3R’s own Smart Blinds do. The 3R smart blinds still have issues getting detected properly into the Alexa ecosystem (e.g. one of the blinds doesn’t present any controls to Alexa but it’s present/detected, and controllable in the 3R-Installer app). But the fact that it works so perfectly with Sengled’s bulbs? Amazing. So, buying this bridge saved me from replacing a bunch of bulbs. I even bought another, to extend the Zigbee range between rooms.You only use the “3R-Installer” app with this thing, because Matter is a local system that’s totally different/separate from 3R’s proprietary cloud-based network. Everything you do on Matter stays inside your home, not using any cloud account. So the 3R-Installer app is used to glue the devices together and give you the info you need to pair the hub over to Alexa and other platforms. No other integrations (that is: you don’t use any 3R “skill” or integration with it). You just use Matter.

It works pretty well, but not perfectly
Using this to tie in some plugs to Google, Alexa and Apple for voice control as well as my primary, home assistant. I was struggling to add it to Apple and Google after adding to home assistant, so I tried removing it from homeassistant and adding it to Apple and Google first and it worked great! It isn’t super fast and plugs have gone unresponsive at times, but they come back on their own. There must be a low power/sleep mode I don’t know about that sleeps the connections. Overall, I’m glad to have it so I can control my plugs vocally, but I do wish it was a little more reliable. I’d probably buy it again if I needed to.

An okay matter to zigbee bridge… if you can get it setup and ignore its shortcomings…
I ordered this as I was tired of issues with cloud supported Zigbee devices… and the odd one that was not supported by Home Assistant. Since I still had some ZIgbee bulbs lying around from the Sengled fiasco, I added them to this to turn them into local matter devices. After completion, they seem to work without any major disconnections… but setup is an issue with the app, as well as device modifications.The initial paring of the hub to the app went well… just scan the code on the hub and then it will update to the latest version. From there it was hit or miss. The first issue is that it could not detect Zigbee at all no matter how many times I reset if or the device to be paired… and the app showed the hub offline after I restarted it. After resetting and pairing the hub to the app again, it started working again. The second issue is that the hub defaulted to Zigbee channel 20 which is too close to at least one 2.4Ghz network in almost any neighborhood… so I had to change it to channel 26… which I did and saved… but after exiting the app and starting it again… and waiting and waiting… then restarting it again… it showed it was still channel 20… so I set it again and saved it… It seems to have taken that time — without this change, nothing was discovered for pairing. Starting to pair right away, I got the the first light to pair… and the second one failed… third one much farther away paired… fourth one paired… fifth one paired with weird flashes… and finally the second paired also with weird flashes. The button to complete pairing is under the three android buttons on the bottom which makes it a pain — bad interface design. While you have it online in the app, you should choose the add matter to other apps option and choose Amazon Alexa if you need it, since getting the app to communicate with the hub is problematic at worst and slow at best. It always takes 4-5 min before it shows the hub online and starts listing the devices…. this could be made fast if they would let you specify its DHCP reserved IP in the app.It looks like they do have some good thoughts on this matter bridge, as it allows you to upgrade the Zigbee device if there is an update available. They also support choosing a power state for light bulbs after power loss… either on or off or last state . You can rename your devices as you like, but these names will not be carried over to Alexa — still they should be unique so you know what they are later…. as you need to add them one by one when you add its matter devices to Alexa and name them then. The app often shows the wrong status on the light bulbs when they show up… and Alexa mostly shows the device and bulbs offline even though they work with voice commands… so if you want to use app control, this is not very stable.The device is smaller than a pack of cards, USB powered, and it seems to be a low draw device, so it could be powered by a battery if necessary… though I think that it would be pointless as most Zigbee home control devices use A/C power. I would prefer if this device had an ethernet port…. as changing Wi-Fi networks requires a factory reset and adding all devices again individually.While it does convert my old Zigbee bulbs and sockets to matter, and it does not require internet access to process their use, it is a bit flakey since the app is problematic as well as determining device status from it or the upstream Alexa app. If all you want is for your voice commands to work with your bulbs again and not to fail like Wink, OSify, or Sengled, this might solve your problems at least for now… I am rating this three stars as it works after lots of trial and error but with remaining issues with which I think the average user will struggle over time.

Bof

Works whout a hitch.