TLDR; I’m regretting buying the rediculously expensive Lutron Caseta Smart Plugs. Because the wall dimmers, remotes and plug-in dimmers all JUST work. Every time.
I have been co-opted into Apple land. Mostly because of the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) I have standardized my whole home ecosystem into the wonderful world of Homekit. We use the Home App for our lights, thermostats (separate heat and ac), and cameras (a-la Unifi plugin for Homebridge).
As such, Apple support for Thread/Matter right natively in the Home app was exciting. So I bought into it, and it was mostly working fine. But then it wasn’t. And then it was, and now it isn’t. What I mean is, I’ll go weeks where all of my timers turn on plugs as expected every day. Then I’ll go weeks where the plug is showing as Updating... stuck in the app forever. I have about 12 of these buggers, mixed between some of these:
Onvis Matter Over Thread Smart Plug, Smart Mini Outlet, Works with Apple Home, Alexa & Google Home, 15A/1800W - Updated Version (4 Pack) - Amazon.com
and the problem is they both seem to have the issue at times. I have to physically unplug them, wait 5 or 10 seconds, and then plug them back in. Even if I physically press the button they will not power on the light or connected device until I reset them. Afterwards they work fine locally or in the home app. Until they don’t again.
I’ve found one instance of a gentleman explaining how much fun he had trying to get them to pair. I have this problem too sometimes. and then I don’t.
What’s the Matter with the Onvis S4 Smart Plug? - myHomeKithome
The problem I have right now is that I don’t even know where to start troubleshooting. Apple land is full of these weird errors that don’t really have good error codes for debugging.
These are not WiFi devices, so I can’t watch for the MAC-Address doing weird things in L2 with packet tracing or network monitoring. Is there an equivalent of tcpdump for a sniffer device on a raspi with a dongle to observe the happenings of the Thread network? I might re-adopt everything BEHIND homebridge just so that I can have some better logging to look at.