en:Intro - rdmtc/RedMatic GitHub Wiki

RedMatic packages Node-RED as a CCU Addon, a software package that can be comfortably installed on a Homematic CCU3 or OpenCCU (formerly RaspberryMatic) via the WebUI. Homematic is a series of smart home automation products by the manufacturer eQ-3, popular especially in Germany.

The basis is formed by Node-RED with the CCU Nodes for Node-RED. These components offer the possibility to visually and easily create rules, automations, scripts and connections to external services and systems for a Homematic System. To a large extent even without programming knowledge. In the Wiki you can find more information about Node-RED and some application examples (so-called Flows).

RedMatic is a good way to connect a Homematic CCU to other systems - right on the CCU, without an additional server:

• MQTT - the ccu-mqtt node publishes all datapoints with a freely configurable topic and payload structure and accepts commands.
• Home Assistant - the ccu-homeassistant node adds MQTT auto-discovery on top of ccu-mqtt: selected devices show up as entities in Home Assistant automatically.
• Matter - RedMatic-Matter exposes Homematic devices as a Matter bridge, usable e.g. with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
• HomeKit - RedMatic-HomeKit exposes Homematic devices as HomeKit accessories. (A possible complement to Matter for Apple users, to work around the missing Matter support for certain devices such as garage doors or irrigation systems.)

All bridges share a single ccu-connection; devices are exposed opt-in by ticking them in the editor. Matter and HomeKit are installed via the Node-RED palette manager, MQTT and Home Assistant ship with the preinstalled CCU nodes.

Why on the CCU rather than with an external bridge project? There are good alternatives such as CCU-Jack, openccu-loom or matterbridge-homematic. The CCU's interface processes (rfd, hs485d, HmIPServer) are, however, sensitive to many concurrent RPC event subscribers and to network hiccups. RedMatic funnels all bridges through a single subscriber per interface, talks the more efficient BIN-RPC instead of XML-RPC to rfd and hs485d, and keeps all RPC traffic on the CCU's loopback interface - network dropouts never reach the CCU processes at all.

What can sit on the other side of the MQTT bridge - two projects by the RedMatic author that understand RedMatic's discovery data out of the box:

• feezal - build MQTT dashboards and apps visually in the browser (WYSIWYG editor, Web Components, PWA, export as a static page or Android/iOS app). Detects the devices RedMatic announces via auto-discovery and wires them up with one click - a modern replacement for the removed RedMatic-WebApp.
• she - smart home engine: automations as plain JavaScript scripts with MQTT, a built-in Matter controller, scheduler and a web IDE with AI assistant. For those who prefer writing logic in code rather than flows, or are looking for a central engine beyond the usual suspects (e.g. Home Assistant or ioBroker) 😉

In addition, a large and active community around Node-RED created a library of thousands of additional nodes which can be installed easily and offer connections to various other services and systems - such as KNX, Loxone, various Smart TVs and AV receivers, Sonos, Hue, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, various databases such as InfluxDB or MySQL, web services to query weather data and much more.

RedMatic can thus - especially for those who don't want to run another server besides the CCU - provide an alternative to a "mature" Smart Home System such as Home Assistant, ioBroker, OpenHAB or FHEM. For the automation of a Homematic system, RedMatic can also be used as an alternative or supplement to "Rega" programs/scripts.

RedMatic is suitable for the CCU3 (and piVCCU3) with firmware 3.61.5 or newer and for current OpenCCU on the architectures armv7l (e.g. Raspberry Pi 2), aarch64 (e.g. Raspberry Pi 3/4/5) and x86_64 (e.g. ova, intelnuc, containers).

On the CCU1, CCU2 and on armv6l systems (Raspberry Pi 1/Zero) RedMatic can not be used.

For Matter (RedMatic-Matter) IPv6 must be enabled on the LAN (a link-local address is enough; RedMatic creates it on the CCU3 at start if it is missing), and the Matter controller (Apple TV/HomePod, Echo, Nest Hub, Home Assistant) must be on the same network segment as the CCU.

A modern browser is required to use the web interfaces, Internet Explorer is not supported.

On the Releases page the file redmatic-<version>.tar.gz is available for download. After the installation of the addon via the Homematic WebUI (Control Panel -> additional software) and the subsequent reboot of the CCU, Node-RED is reachable at http://<ccu-address>/addons/red. Patience is required during installation, it can take a few minutes.

For feedback of any kind, questions, suggestions and wishes please use the discussion forum, for bug reports the Issue Tracker.

Participation in any form is welcome and desired, especially all users are invited to extend the list of successfully tested nodes, to publish sample flows and to contribute to the improvement and extension of the documentation.

No donations will be accepted, but I would be happy if the successful usage of this software is acknowledged by giving the project a Github star ⭐️