Has anyone used Casambi and Octo lighting with Smartthings ?
E.g. via Alexa
(Looking at some ansell mini downlights and wondering if they can be controlled. Casambi seems to be some kind of Bluetooth low energy system.)
Has anyone used Casambi and Octo lighting with Smartthings ?
E.g. via Alexa
(Looking at some ansell mini downlights and wondering if they can be controlled. Casambi seems to be some kind of Bluetooth low energy system.)
This one gets complicated, so bear with me.
Casambi is a smart lighting platform, high end, which seems to have been designed mostly for commercial buildings. They donât have anything that you can buy directly: they license their platform to various lighting companies.
Ansell is a big lighting company that started using the casambi platform mostly for outdoor lighting but also indoors, with products under the OCTO name. So it was OCTO by ansell, but running on the casambi platform. Thatâs a Bluetooth mesh.
Butâ Casambi doesnât have anything that works with any voice assistants.
So in 2020, Ansell (not Casambi) made a deal with signify, who is the parent company of Philips hue, to start selling wiz connected devices under the Ansell OCTO name.
So now itâs âOCTO wiz connected by Ansellâ which can be used in the same app, I believe, as the older âOCTO by Ansellâ Casambi products.
Iâve never heard anybody mention Casambi in the context of smartthings. I donât think thereâs any integration there. And the octo products which might integrate with smartthings look to be identical to the wiz products, except I think that once youâve connected them to OCTO you canât connect them to smartthings anymore.
So you can get some of the same products under a different brand name (just plain Wiz), but I donât think you can use any individual device thatâs visible in the OCTO app with smartthings. Hopefully if someone knows differently, they will say.
Jeepers, more of a tech mess.
âWiZ technology encapsulates multi-protocol connectivity such as WiFi, Bluetooth and 2.4 Ghz low consumption radio frequency. It integrates a feature rich app with intuitive interface, a secured cloud access with real-time interoperability with leading IoT platforms and voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Apple Siri shortcuts and Samsung Smart Things.â
So according to this quote from the link you provided there should be some integration !?
I do wish companies would just provide diagrams of their tech architecture instead of treating everyone like a tech imbecile. Descriptions like , itâs great, itâs IOT, Wi-Fi, BLE, and generally magic are useless.
So more hours of research ahead trying to unpick what these things actually are from the complete mess of company names, brand names, platform names, technologies, and marketing bullshit.
Wiz looks like it is cloud based ? So all your Wi-Fi bulbs are going to talk to the internet ? And how are they claiming to have motion activated lighting without using motion sensors ? Er Itâs âmagicâ.
Sigh.
âWhile you exhale that wow sigh, [vomit] letâs add that the Alexa interface is also compatible with a range of other smart ecosystems including Ring, Hive, and Samsung Smart Thingsâ
https://octouk.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/OCTO-Gateway-Launch-V.05.22-1.pdf
I must say Casambi seems to provide access to a vast array of devices and lights including modules all based on BLE it seemsâŚ
https://Casambi.com/ecosystem/
Casambi has a lot of stuff, but you canât usually buy the kit directlyâ they are a âwhite labelâ company so their devices are sold to other companies which add stuff to them and brand them under the second companyâs name. Same thing with the app.
In the UK, you would probably be buying them from the Ansell âOctoâ line, although there are a couple of other companies as well, but most of those sell only for big commercial installations like hotels and restaurants. Ansell OCTO seems to be the one thatâs easiest for individual end customers to find.
Once they brought Wiz from Signify into the mix they got some Alexa integration that way, and then they appear to be describing Alexa routines as an intermediary for Ring/SmartThings, etc.
What I donât know is whether you can control any of the non-wiz Casambi devices via Alexa or not, that part just isnât clear to me. Maybe with the Ansell âgateway device.â
Probably your best bet is to contact Ansell customer support and ask them. See the bottom of the following page: