[quote=“grahampcharles, post:5, topic:10379, full:true”]
Thanks, all… hopefully whatever standard the 45631 uses will be supported by ST in the future, and I’ll keep an eye on the Aeon Labs thing.
Just curious, now… why don’t such things exist? They seem like the easiest bits of kit to make, and given that the workaround is to mount a spare tablet to the wall (!!!) it seems like a no-brainer to me.
What am I missing?[/quote]
It’s easy to have a zigbee wallmount control panel that controls zigbee devices. Or a zwave wallmount control panel that controls zwave devices. Or a wallmount Insteon control panel that controls Insteon devices. IF your switch and hub are certified for that protocol.
It’s much harder to have a physical control panel where every switch could control zigbee or zwave. Let alone Insteon or other proprietary protocols. And even more so when your hub isn’t actually certified for any of those protocols, but is just using a subset of the open standard.
So far all the switch panels people have mentioned handle only one protocol. So you’d have to know which of your devices it could control before you even started thinking about using it with ST.
From the beginning, ST had the philosophy that the retail customer wouldn’t even have to know if one of their devices was zigbee or zwave or whatever–ST would figure that all out for them and you’d be able to use the same commands interchangeably through the ST app.
In practice, that’s ended up being pretty darn hard to pull off. ST does the best it can, and prioritizes the devices with highest customer demand, but you’ll still find most of the conversations in this community get pretty techie. And many smartapp descriptions only make sense if you understand those techie issues.
A tablet works as a wallmount controller because the ST app is already designed to display devices of different protocols as equivalents. That’s the whole point of the ST philosophy. “On at sunset” is on at sunset whether the lamp is zigbee, TCP, zwave, whatever. And because the tablet app ISN’T acting as a secondary controller for any protocol–it’s just acting as an interface to the primary controller, the ST hub.
So, yes, building switches as a secondary controller for ONE protocol is pretty easy. Building one for multiple protocols using the open platform model is way harder and may just be too expensive.