Current State of ST?

General Discussion
1

Hi All.

I used to use SmartThings but when Groovy was ditched I headed over to HA. Which is great but very complicated and can feel like a lot of work.

So I’m thinking of porting back over but I’m wondering what’s the current state of ST?

Have they managed to integrate Hive heating?

Is there a strong community still producing Zigbee drivers. I tried but can’t write them in edge!

The automations were a breeze with ST it was just a shame that the system felt more limited after the change from groovy to edge???

Thanks

2

Time when transition from groovy to edge happened was little bit chaotic but after couple of years I think edge based ST is really nice and works pretty well. There´s also active community making lots of nice edge drivers these days.
I use both ST/HA and they work nicely together so it´s also possible to have best of the both worlds.

3

I am possibly not representative of the community but here is my 2 cents (2 pence; I am UK based).
I had been using SmartThings, with a V2 hub, for a few years when the Edge transition happened.
I had mostly stuck to Ikea Tradfri Zigbee bulbs etc. but, for my home heating I had two Z-Wave thermostats (older Secure SRT models) that used custom Groovy handlers. These were shared by the community, I had no experience of writing Groovy.
With no expectation that the manufacturer, or anybody else, would write Secure SRT Edge drivers (and with winter approaching) I started studying existing community Z-Wave thermostat Edge drivers.
Several of the community Edge drivers covered multiple devices via inheritance, which confused me.
Via: cut and paste of such drivers, trial an error, questions in this forum, diagnostics such as Z-Wave Device Config Mc, I got a working Edge driver for one of my thermostats and tuned it over time.
My second thermostat followed and it worked much better than the Groovy handler it replaced. An added bonus was that, unlike the custom Groovy handlers they replaced, the Edge drivers operate locally on my hub.
I have gone on to write a few other Z-Wave Edge drivers but no Zigbee yet.
Unlike others on this forum, I am no expert in Edge or Lua. But I am a retired software engineer and put in the hours: reading specifications, writing debug statements, monitoring logs, asking people who are expert (and are very helpful), and not giving up.
I find SmartThings very easy to live with and mostly maintenance free.
Oh, I have no experience of HA. It does appeal to the software engineer in me but not to the retired software engineer who needs to keep my wife on side.
Good luck,
Aidan

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