matter_dcl: a Matter device lookup for Dart

When a smart light joins your network, it doesn’t announce itself as “Living room lamp”. It shares two numbers: one for the company that made it and one for the product. Turning those numbers into something a person recognises is a small job, but every smart home app has to do it.

Today we’re releasing the code we use for that in the Firedance app.

matter_dcl

matter_dcl looks up Matter devices in the Distributed Compliance Ledger, the official public registry run by the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Give it a device’s vendor and product numbers and it returns the company and product name, along with links to the product and support pages when the maker has registered them.

It’s written in Dart, so it works in Flutter apps on phones and computers, and on servers too.

A few details we cared about:

• It never crashes your app. If a number isn’t registered, or the network is slow, you get “not found” instead of an error.
• It’s quick. Results are saved, so the same device is only looked up once.
• It’s honest about names. Brands and the companies behind them don’t always match. LIFX lights are registered by Feit Electric, for example, so the package makes it easy to show the product name people know.

It’s free under the Apache 2.0 license, and it’s on pub.dev, the home of Dart and Flutter packages, so adding it to an app is one line:

dart pub add matter_dcl

View matter_dcl on pub.dev · View it on GitHub

More this month

This is the first of six open source releases we’re sharing in the run-up to Halloween. Follow along on GitHub, or sign up for updates to hear when FirePod is ready.