Arduino Nano Matter Board Adds Zigbee Support

Arduino has announced a Core toolchain update for its Arduino Nano Matter development board that adds Zigbee networking to the board’s existing Matter-over-Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy capabilities. Update the Arduino Core for Silicon Labs to version 5.0, and the Nano Matter’s 802.15.4 radio can speak all three major low-power smart home protocols — no new hardware required.

“The Arduino Nano Matter board has always been about the low-power side of the smart home,” the Arduino team explained. “Until now, your sketches had two ways into the smart home: Matter over Thread and Bluetooth LE wireless technology, both on its Silicon Labs MGM240S module. Update the Arduino core for Silicon Labs to 5.0, and your sketches can speak Zigbee too.”

What the update delivers

The Zigbee support arrives purely as a software update for existing hardware. According to the report on hackster.io, where the story broke on October 16, 2026, Arduino is not changing the board at all: the same IEEE 802.15.4 radio that carries Thread traffic can now run a Zigbee stack, and enabling it is as simple as it gets. “Pick Zigbee from a menu in the Arduino IDE, upload an example, and your board joins the smart home network that bulbs, sensors, and switches already share,” the Arduino team said.

The new Core is available in the Arduino IDE now, shipping with 14 examples covering 11 device types — including lights, switches, and temperature, humidity, light, and contact sensors. Maker Bozont Bacsi has already published a smart clock project on the Arduino Project Hub that uses the new Zigbee support, showing how quickly the feature moved from announcement to real builds.

A look at the hardware

The Arduino Nano Matter launched back in October 2024, after a short “community preview” program, and has since become Arduino’s primary board for low-power smart home work. Built in the familiar Nano form factor — with castellated pin headers that work equally well with through-hole pins for breadboard prototyping or soldered directly onto a carrier board as a module — it is built around Silicon Labs’ MGM240S wireless module.

• Processor: 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33F running at up to 78 MHz
• Memory: 256 kB SRAM and 1,536 kB flash
• Radios: Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy plus an IEEE 802.15.4 radio (Thread, Matter over Thread — and now Zigbee)

That memory budget matters here: Matter, Thread, and Zigbee stacks each need room to breathe, and the MGM240S’s 1.5 MB of flash leaves headroom for meaningful firmware, which is one reason the board could absorb Zigbee support without a hardware revision.

Background: why Zigbee still matters in 2026

It is tempting to treat Zigbee as yesterday’s protocol. Matter has been the industry’s headline standard since its 2022 launch, and Thread is its favored low-power transport. But Zigbee never went away: it powers an enormous installed base of bulbs, switches, sensors, and plugs from Philips Hue, IKEA DIRIGERA, Aqara, Sonoff, and others, and it remains the cheapest route to battery-powered sensing at scale.

For DIY smart home builders, the friction has always been protocols: a Matter project needs a Matter fabric; a Zigbee sensor needs a Zigbee coordinator. Platforms like Home Assistant bridge the two, but on the hardware side you usually had to pick a camp. A single inexpensive development board that can participate in a Zigbee mesh one moment and a Matter fabric the next makes that choice disappear — exactly what a board aimed at makers should do.

Arduino’s emphasis until now had been firmly on Matter support, which makes this move noteworthy: rather than betting everything on Matter, Arduino is acknowledging that Zigbee’s installed base — and the 2.4 GHz radio real estate it shares with Thread, since both use IEEE 802.15.4 — deserves first-class support on its flagship low-power board.

What it means for your smart home

For most homeowners this is a maker’s story, not a shopping story: the Arduino Nano Matter is a development board, not a finished product. But it has a practical payoff. If you are building custom sensors — the classic use cases being environmental sensors, contact sensors, button controllers, or one-off lighting projects — you can now talk to your existing Zigbee gear directly, rather than building a separate Matter island and bridging it afterward.

It also makes the Nano Matter a more versatile lab tool. A board that speaks Zigbee, Thread/Matter, and BLE in one package can prototype, sniff, and test behavior across the three low-power protocols that define the 2026 smart home landscape. For anyone deep in Home Assistant — where Zigbee and Matter devices already coexist — that is a compelling reason to have one in the parts drawer.

The update is available now through the Arduino IDE’s board manager. If you already own an Arduino Nano Matter, updating the Silicon Labs Core to 5.0 is all it takes to give your board a third wireless language.