I’ve been experimenting with the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350) and wanted to see how difficult it would be to build a fully compliant Matter smart device from scratch using Rust.

I put together a complete "Blinky" example using the rs-matter stack and the embassy async framework. It uses BLE for the initial commissioning phase and Wi-Fi for network connectivity. Once flashed, you can provision it directly into Apple Home, Google Home, or Home Assistant using your smartphone—no cloud accounts required. It exposes a standard Matter On/Off cluster that toggles a physical LED wired to the GPIO pins.

A few interesting technical notes from the build:

Bare Metal: It runs entirely no_std on bare metal using embassy-rp. Radio Coexistence: Getting the CYW43439 wireless chip to handle concurrent BLE (for commissioning) and Wi-Fi (for Matter IP traffic) on the RP2350 took some tweaking. We actually had to dial back the PIO SPI clock divider specifically because the RP2350's faster 150MHz core clock was causing bus corruption when the radio was saturated! Async Rust: The repo includes the full async CoEx (coexistence) runner setup to safely multiplex the radio between the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks concurrently. If you’ve been wanting to build local-only smart home devices but felt intimidated by the massive official C++ Matter SDK, doing it in Rust is actually becoming incredibly approachable.

Would love to hear if anyone else is building custom smart home gear in Rust.