Hardware and Functional Requirements, and Integration of Matter with an Existing Project (CON-1433)

[esp-dev]

Dear Team,

We are planning to use ESP-Matter in our IoT project, and we have several questions regarding hardware and functional requirements as well as integration:

1. Hardware Requirements (to pass Matter certification):

   • Which CPU model is recommended for devices supporting Matter?
   • Is PSRAM required? If yes, what is the minimum recommended amount?
   • What is the minimum flash memory required?

2. Additional Functionalities:

   • Our device must support a local HTTP server and provide at least one cloud connection via TLS. Does ESP-Matter support implementing these functionalities? Are there any recommendations for integrating these features with the SDK?
   • We require support for AP mode, WPS, and the ability to manually configure static IP addresses. Does ESP-Matter natively support these features, or will they need to be implemented from scratch?
   • Regarding device pairing, does Matter offer the option to pair using AP mode, or is Bluetooth mandatory for pairing?

3. Integration of Matter with an Existing Project:

   • What are the recommendations for adding Matter support to an existing project based on ESP-IDF? Are there any examples or documentation available to facilitate such integration?
   • Does ESP-Matter provide ready-to-use components that can be integrated into an application already using other communication stacks?

We would greatly appreciate detailed responses to help us better plan the implementation and adaptation of our existing system to support Matter.

Kind regards,

[jonsmirl]

I'm not Espressif employee, but I have been working with esp-matter for a long time....

It is very easy to switch CPUs with the esp-idf, you just set-target and recompile. So I would develop on an ESP32-S3 with PSRAM initially. It is a lot of hassle dealing with low RAM conditions so just avoid that initially. Then after you get your code working see if it fits on something like the ESP32-C3. All of the basic Matter devices will fit onto the ESP32-C3, so this is a function of how much other stuff you add. For example, my system implements a bridge and a lot of other stuff and it requires PSRAM. But that's just because all of the other stuff I added needs about 300KB of additional memory, if I removed the stuff I added it wouldn't need PSRAM.

As for the other things, I run esp-matter in one task and I run esp-idf code in another task. As far as I know you can do anything you want in the other task as long don't do something like change the wifi mode when the other task is using it. I am also running an http server and esp-matter is basically unaware that I am doing that. You just need to implement some messaging between the tasks to coordinate. In my case esp-matter gets wifi running, then it I send a message which starts the http task.

Look in the closed issues, other people have built custom pairing solutions. One way to do that is to get the device onto wifi using your non-matter solution. Then start Matter in on-network commissioning mode. On-network mode assumes the network is already running. I believe this is encoded into the QRCode so IOS will know to use on-network instead of Bluetooth.

[esp-dev]

Hi Jon,
thank you for your reply. Messages between tasks seem to make sense. I will think about implementing this.
I also looked through the esp-matter code and the implementation is now better than it was at the beginning. This is built so that part of the code is in esp-matter and part of it is in the connectedhomeip/src/platform/ESP32 repository itself. I haven't looked at the updated matter documentation yet, but I can see that there has been progress. Previously, I also encountered the problem of statically allocated memory by the matter library. In turn, getting rid of bluetooth would not only save flash and RAM, but also get rid of bluetooth certification.
If RAM is insufficient, ESP32-S3R2 is quite expensive, the old ESP32 with PSRAM seems to be better. We are still waiting for the C5 or C61 series to appear.