Matter – EVerest bridge

What is it?

What is Matter?

Matter is the Smart Home standard that everyone is talking about. Its been around since late 2022 and has a growing adoption.
Backed by the tech giants (Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung SmartThings) and numerous other companies, it allows devices to communicate securely, with a common data model and APIs. Moreover it has a frustration free setup process (scan a QR code, tap an NFC with your smart phone) and the devices join to your home ecosystem.

Matter 1.5 added more energy management features – including EV chargers (EVSE) with Vehicle2Grid or Vehicle2Home (bi-directional) charging. But it supports multiple other device types too – Water Heaters, Heat pumps (HVAC), Solar and Battery Storage.

You can find out more about it https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ and for more technical details https://handbook.buildwithmatter.com/

The source code for Matter is in the connectedhomeip repo.

What is EVerest?

Project EVerest is an open-source Linux based EV charger stack that several EV Charger manufacturers are starting to adopt. It makes it simpler to implement an EV charger by making modular components such as metering, OCPP support and ISO15118-20 bi-directional charging features. Unlike other open-source projects which are sometimes left to the goodwill of the community it is actively maintained by Pionix Gmbh.

You can find the documentation here: https://everest.github.io/

Why a bridge?

Manufacturers of EV Chargers don’t necessarily want to get into the details of Matter.

The Matter connectedhomeip repo is very large, complex with its own build system and numerous submodule dependencies. Since we are running on a Linux platform natively supported by Matter, and the fact that EVerest uses MQTT as a protocol to allow its modules to communicate, we built a ‘bridge’ to allow Matter to learn the state of the EVSE, and to also allow it to control it.

The https://github.com/adectio/connectedhomeip-everest repo is a fork from the upstream project-chip/connectedhomeip repo with additional MQTT translation layer built into the example evse-app. It uses the ‘Stable API’ of EVerest so should work out of the box with Everest 2026.02.1 release.