A bit of background – I have recently started working on my home automation again. About 5 years ago, I bought a SmartThings hub (v2) and installed several devices. SmartThings says I have about 50 devices now. Most of them are lights and door & water sensors. I will retire in the spring, so I will have time to play with my home automation! I don’t foresee needing massive automation, but some improvements are in order. Especially to address family concerns!
As I move forward, I need to upgrade my smart home hub to include the latest technologies: Matter, Thread, and long-range Z-Wave. So, I am looking for some input for upgrading to SmartThings V3. I am not an expert by any means. I may not have any idea of what I am doing, so feedback is what I need. Upgrading to SmartThings V3 is an obvious choice, but is it the right choice?
In the last 2’ish years, Samsung has notably modified the system. In the past two months, I discovered all my voice alerts with Alexa were removed. If I had a water leak, my sensors would have been useless since there would have been no voice alerts. This does not bode well for my confidence in SmartThings. However, there are several updates that I am very enthusiastic about.
My biggest concern is the new integration with voice assistants. I have multiple Alexa units throughout my house and a Google hub. I bought Google Hub on a whim and have never used it as a hub. So, to do a simple, at least to me, voice alert on a sensor I need to:
Add a sensor to SmartThings.
Add an Edge Driver for AlexaSwitch.
Add automation to trigger AlexaSwitch by the sensor.
On Alexa, add an automation to trigger an alert for the sensor.
This is about as simple a use case for a sensor that I can come up with. Previously, after I added the Alexa connection once, I only needed the sensor and a single. So, two steps. The case I currently have is to set up an alert to remind me to take medications twice a day. I can do it, but it should not be as difficult as it appears.
My concern is twofold. Voice Assistant integration has become overly complicated and my confidence in SmartThings not breaking my “system” is, at best, poor. This is before I have done any more than scratched the surface. My use cases are simple. So, to enter my utility room and find out it has folded (which has happened before) to learn that, “Oh, we deleted that integration,” is not exciting.
I do like the amount of local processing that resulted from migration. The new web interface is very promising. I have not found a SmartThings roadmap, but it would be awesome to see one. Simple things like dashboards (I have Action Tiles) are integrated into other platforms.
The v3/Aeotec hub will give you Matter over Wi-Fi and Matter over Thread support, but not LR Z-Wave. The downside to the v3 is that it has less memory than the v2 so if you have a need for a lot of community developed drivers or hundreds and hundreds of devices, you might run up against memory limitations.
Other than the v3/Aeotec hub, the only new hubs that have been released by Samsung are the ones integrated into appliances like TVs/refrigerators and the ST Station that was release 18-24 months ago. The downside to those options is that Z-Wave has been dropped and the community’s feeling is that ST is favoring Matter over Wi-Fi/Thread instead of Z-Wave.
ST moved from being totally cloud based with the Groovy architecture platform that handled the DTHs for devices and the SmartApps. With the move to the Lua-based Edge architecture, the Edge drivers running on the hub offer a greater degree of locality (subject to things that force Routines to run in the cloud like push notifications, etc). Of course, there is no longer a platform for running SmartApps which has resulted in many community developed applications going away and not coming back, including the voice SmartApps that would play audio on the various voice assistants (one of the primary drivers to shutdown the Groovy platform due to cost).
Yes, there is always the possibility that ST will break the existing community developed Edge driver(s) that support Alexa switch/sensor integration. It’s not a native integration and the developer of the vEdge Creator driver (the most commonly used one) is no longer participating in the ST community. Frankly, for your use case, I’d probably pick up some cheap smart speakers that work with ST which would allow you to do native voice notifications. That being said, I have multiple voice notifications triggered by ST Routines that play on my Alexa device(s) including “welcome home” messages based on presence and “X is open” based on contact sensors. Is it a little tedius to have to set up a Routine in ST and one in the Alexa app, yeah I suppose. But, as of right now it works and is the only way to get Alexa/voice assistant notifications.
As @jkp said, it’s unlikely you see a detailed roadmap and we generally only see very high level announcements like “ST will support Matter 1.x in late 202x”.
Yes, there is in no native dashboarding feature, but Action Tiles works with ST for creating dashboards and there is also sharptools.io that can be used to create dashboards.
If you are heavily invested in Z-Wave devices as I am, you may want to consider the alternative platforms, as well. There will be learning curves, of course, but the options exist out there. One of my homes has already been converted to the Z-Box Hub and, so far, it has performed flawlessly. However, I have no Zigbee or Matter stuff as of this date, so that point for me is moot.
Thank you for the thorough feedback and it helps me move forward.
I do agree setting up routines in both ST and Alexa is not a major deal. For me, it is about the design decision to add this complexity which relies on the ST community to develop a solution.
As ST stands, I have lost capabilities that were available under Groovy. While I have always like ST, my confidence in their design decision is lacking.
Thanks, @Barkis. I am considering Home Assistant, but still need to research some more. I have a background in software development, so more complexity is not overly daunting. Besides, I need something to keep me busy (and out of my wife’s hair) when I retire in three months!
