‘Matter’ is an industry-unifying standard, guided by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance), for reliably, securely and seamlessly connected devices. Matter is meant to increase compatibility among smart-home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Espressif has been part of the Matter initiative since its early days. In a blogpost originally published by Espressif’s engineer Hrishikesh Dhayagude, readers can learn how they can easily build a Matter application on ESP32.

The Matter SDK is an open-source repository for the implementation of the above-mentioned connectivity standard. ESP32 has been supported in the Matter SDK since the very beginning, and it is currently the only option which can offer both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE connectivity. Furthermore, ESP32 supports commissioning (for the initial device configuration) over Bluetooth LE and a Wi-Fi SoftAP, while also supporting operational communication over Wi-Fi.

For building your first Matter application on ESP32, the following examples are suggested:

• • ESP32 all-clusters-app: This example allows developers to experiment with all the Matter features by using ESP32-based development kits, such as the ESP-WROVER-KIT, ESP32-DevKit-C, and M5Stack Core1. With this example, users can perform device commissioning and control the device, using a Matter controller. This is also the default application used for development and testing.
  • Footprint-optimized application: The ESP32 temperature-measurement-app is specifically optimised for facilitating footprint-impact analyses.

Either of these examples can be tested on a Matter controller. More precisely, the Matter SDK provides a reference implementation for the controllers below:

• • Python-based Device Controller
  • CHIPTool
  • Android CHIPTool
  • Darwin CHIPTool

To get all the details on exactly how developers can use Matter on ESP32, you can read Hrishikesh Dhayagude's blogpost on the ESP Journal.