G410 as Thread Border Router in Home Assistant - Without Apple Home

Aqara Products
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My Setup:

  • Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410 (chime unit) as my only Thread Border Router
  • Aqara Smart Lock U400 x2
  • Home Assistant running on a dedicated laptop (wired ethernet)
  • No Apple Home hub, no Google Home hub
  • IPv6 enabled on my router

What I have successfully done:

  • Added G410 to Aqara app and set up a fresh Thread network
  • Paired both U400 locks to the G410 as their Matter controller via the Aqara app
  • Both U400 locks show as connected via Matter in the Aqara app and work correctly there
  • Added G410 to Home Assistant via the HomeKit Device integration successfully (10 entities showing including doorbell press event, motion sensor, and camera stream)
  • Thread integration added to HA — G410 border router is visible under “Other Networks”

The Problem:
While the G410 works perfectly within the Aqara ecosystem, I am unable to get the Thread network into Home Assistant as the preferred network, which is preventing me from commissioning the U400 locks into HA via Matter.

The HA Thread integration can see the G410 as a border router but lists it under “Other Networks” with no preferred network set. There are no interactive options to set it as preferred.

The key issue seems to be that HA gets its Thread credentials pushed from the iOS companion app, which in turn gets them from iCloud Keychain — which is only populated if you have an Apple Home hub. Since I have no Apple Home hub, there are no credentials in iCloud to push to HA, so the G410’s Thread network can never be set as preferred.

When attempting to commission either U400 into HA via Matter (using a sharing code generated from the Aqara app), the commissioning hangs indefinitely and never completes.

My Questions:

  1. Is there a way to extract the Thread network TLV dataset directly from the G410 so it can be manually entered into Home Assistant?
  2. Does the Aqara app expose the Thread network credentials anywhere that could be used outside of the Apple ecosystem?
  3. Has anyone successfully used the G410 as a Thread Border Router in HA without any Apple Home hardware?
  4. Is there a planned update to allow the G410’s Thread credentials to be shared to HA without requiring Apple Home as an intermediary?

The G410 is marketed as compatible with Home Assistant, and the U400 is marketed as a Matter over Thread device that works with HA — but in practice it seems like Apple Home hardware is an undocumented requirement to make this work. Any clarification or workaround from the Aqara team or community would be greatly appreciated!

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@absent @JohnD @rchiileea Could you check this? Thanks

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After trying some more today (2 weeks in on this endeavor) I finally got the U400 to pair. The steps I took today are as follows:

  • Before starting: Enable Matter debug logging — go to Settings → Devices & Services → Matter → three dot menu → Enable Debug Logging. This appears to help the commissioning complete it is the only thing different that I did versus the other 30+ times I have tried this
  • In the Aqara app go to the U400 device page and generate a Matter pairing code (look for Share to other ecosystems or similar option)
  • In HA go to Settings → Devices & Services → Matter → Add Device
  • Enter the generated code
  • Once complete you should get 11 entities including lock/unlock control, battery, auto-relock time, and others
  • Disable Matter debug logging when done

Key Lessons Learned:

  1. Ghost Thread networks stored in iCloud Keychain and on the G410 device itself will cause repeated failures — a truly clean slate is essential
  2. The Thread preferred network in HA does NOT need to be set for Matter commissioning to work via the G410
  3. Enabling Matter debug logging before commissioning appears to help the process complete successfully — without it commissioning silently hangs with no activity in the logs

Hope this helps someone else with the same setup or issues!

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