How It Works

How it works

Thread Pulse runs completely in your browser, inside your Home Assistant dashboard. There is no integration, no add-on and no server part.

Data sources

What	Source
Matter devices, names, areas	Home Assistant device, entity and area registry
Thread role, neighbours, signal strength, routes, stability counters	Thread Network Diagnostics cluster of each Matter device, taken from Home Assistant's cached Matter diagnostics
Manufacturer, model, firmware, hardware	Basic Information cluster (same source)
Restarts, last restart reason	General Diagnostics cluster (same source)
Battery type	Power Source cluster (same source)
Battery level, current values	Entity states in Home Assistant
Border router	otbr/info of the OpenThread Border Router integration
Live messages and commands	Home Assistant events state_changed and call_service

No live queries to devices

Thread Pulse only reads data that Home Assistant already has. It never asks a device directly. This keeps the page fast and – important for battery devices – it does not wake them up and does not cost battery.

The flip side: Thread data is the state the devices last reported. Some values (e.g. packet counters, uptime) are reported rarely; uptime is therefore not shown at all.

Admin rights

Device diagnostics, the entity registry and the area registry are only available to administrators in Home Assistant. That is why Thread Pulse needs an administrator login.

Route calculation

Thread routers keep a routing table with the next hop towards every other router. Thread Pulse uses these tables to calculate the most likely path from a device to the border router – details in Live data flow. The real route can differ, because Thread adapts its routes continuously.

What is stored, and where

What	Where	Shared?
List shown, legend shown, traffic heat, room view	localStorage of your browser	no – per browser
Change log (max. 100 entries)	localStorage of your browser	no – per browser
Live counters, response times, traffic heat values	memory of the open page	lost on reload

Nothing is written to Home Assistant.

Privacy

• The page uses the session of the logged-in Home Assistant user and only talks to your Home Assistant.
• No data is sent anywhere else. No external scripts, fonts or images are loaded – the graph library is shipped with Thread Pulse.

Performance

• The dashboard card file is small (about 75 kB). The graph library (about 1.6 MB, readable source) is loaded only when a Thread Pulse card is shown, so other dashboards are not slowed down.
• Loading the map takes a few seconds for about 20 devices.
• Every 5 minutes the data is loaded again for the change log.

Third-party components

• vis-network 9.1.9 for drawing the network (MIT / Apache 2.0)
• Material Design Icons for the device icons (Apache 2.0)