Battery-powered Matter project on XIAO MG24 - is ICD/SIT support coming to Arduino, or should I switch chips?

Products & Technology XIAO
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Hi everyone,

I’m a software developer learning electronics as a hobby, and I’m trying to build a small battery-powered Matter project on the XIAO MG24 - a DIY motorized roller blind controller, similar in concept to the Aqara Roller Shade Driver E1. The plan: a small DC motor, a 3D-printed enclosure, a Li-ion cell, controlled from Home Assistant via Matter-over-Thread. The XIAO MG24 looked perfect for this - until I started looking at battery life.

This is where I hit a wall. As I understand it, the Arduino Silabs core builds the Matter stack as a Full Thread Device (FTD), which keeps the radio always-on. Real-world idle current ends up around ~5-8 mA, which gives roughly 2 weeks on an 18650 battery.

What I actually need is Matter ICD - ideally SIT for ~1 s response time, which is fine for a blind. The underlying Silabs Matter SDK supports this (CHIP_CONFIG_ENABLE_ICD_SERVER), and I can see all the conditional code for it in the package, but it’s compiled out in the Arduino core’s prebuilt gsdk.a and there’s no API exposed in the Matter library to configure poll intervals.

There’s an open GitHub issue requesting this from over a year ago with no progress: SiliconLabs/arduino#154.

My questions to the Seeed community and to anyone here from the Silabs Arduino team:

  1. Is ICD/SIT support on the roadmap for the Arduino Silabs core? Even basic SIT with a couple of Matter.setSlowPollInterval() style API calls would unlock a huge class of hobbyist battery projects on the XIAO MG24.

  2. For someone who isn’t a professional embedded engineer, is Simplicity Studio really the only path? I’ve looked at it and it’s a serious step up in complexity - different build system, ZAP editor, J-Link debugger required. Is there a middle ground?

  3. Or would you recommend a different chip entirely? I have ESP32-H2 boards on hand and esp-matter set up, but real-world measurements I’ve found (Tomas McGuinness’s blog) suggest ~190–650 µA average on the SuperMini even with ICD enabled, so MG24 still seems like the better target if I can get to ICD. Or is there something else (Nordic nRF52840 with Zephyr?) that’s a saner middle ground for hobby battery Matter?

My use case is dead simple - open/close a blind on command, idle most of the time, run for months on a battery. This feels like it should be a 10-line config change, not a full migration to a professional toolchain. Hoping to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Thanks!