I am completely new to the ZigBee community so please pardon me if I sound too stupid. I am trying to develop a sample project wherein I want a USB dongle such as the MeshConnect’s ZM357 to talk with other zigbee devices such as the SmartPower Outlet. My questions are, do the smartthings devices support such a system or does every command need to go through the Smart Hub? Which ZigBee dongle(or some other similar device) would you recommend? Which software stack (preferably open source/ free) would be the best for this project?
Interesting concept, but i think you already partially answered you own question. The SmartThings hub is exactly that, the hub or central point of communications for all your “smart things”. Even on the zwave front when you add additional controllers they only talk to the hub and the hub figures out what to do with it. Also on both the zwave and zigbee sides when you introduce a new Master or hub to a device, the device will drop the settings for the old master. Sometimes with great difficulty to go back to the previous master. With all of that out of the way… the better question to ask is what is the goal of adding the USB dongle? or what tasks are you trying to accomplish that you feel this piece of hardware is a good fit? I ask cause there are a lot of ways to skin a cat and adding hardware may work, but somethings software is a better answer.
As you might know, companies like Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm etc. are working on standardizing the IoT world. Although most of them do not support ZigBee yet, at some point in the future we would like to have a ZigBee plugin for their stacks (Iotivity, AllJoin etc.). Hence, I wanted to get started with this sample project.
FYI, Microsoft has just released Device System Bridge reference implementation for integrating “legacy” smart home protocols, such as Z-Wave with AllJoin network.
With the AllJoyn Device System Bridge contribution from Microsoft, you can connect existing devices that use BACnet or Z-Wave to an AllJoyn network, thereby enabling existing devices to interact with new AllJoyn devices, as well as enabling cloud connectivity across all devices on the network.