Devolo Home Control Kit

[JDRoberts]

@Andrew_Palmer

For me, it kind of illustrates what’s broken with home automation. Stuff might be Z-Wave but unless your controller knows about the device, you seem to be a bit screwed. I kind of feel that each Z-Wave device ought to be able to publish what its capabilities are, say, like an XML schema. I’m certainly no expert in the technical side so if I’m talking nonsense, feel free to educate me.

Actually, the devices already do. In addition, when any Z wave device is certified, a “conformance statement” is published on the official Z wave alliance website that lists exactly which commands it can both receive and send.

http://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/1143

So the issue is down to each controller as far as which commands they want to support. The zwave standard only requires that A controller be able to send a “basic” (that’s an official Z wave term) command, which basically means an on/off.

For example, there are several zwave command sets that SmartThings does not support, including controller replication. There are other zwave command sets that the SmartThings controller can receive, but it doesn’t do anything with them. So you have to write your own device handler to process them. Central scene commands are a good example of this.

The devolo wall controller, for example, will not work out of the box with smartthings because it uses central scene commands. However, @AdamV has written a custom device handler which works very well with it.

First, the FAQ on how custom device Handlers work in the SmartThings system:

[OBSOLETE] FAQ: An Overview of Using Custom Code in SmartThings (SmartThings Classic, Groovy Code)

The original FAQ information in this thread refers to the original smartthings architecture, which was in place through the end of 2022 and a little beyond. Custom code was written in the groovy programming language and ran in the smartthings cloud. As of May 2023, you can no longer add new Groovy DTH‘s or smartapps to your smartthings account. So if you came here because of a link in an old forum thread, or on another site, I’m afraid the Groovy information is no longer usable. All of this was replaced by a new architecture. Cloud to cloud integrations use the smartthings API. Hub connected devices, mostly Zigbee and zwave, now use “Edge Drivers,” written in the LUA programming language. Here’s the official announcement on those: The process for using a custom Edge Driver in the new …

And here, a link to the custom code that would make the DeVolo wall controller work with SmartThings:

[OBSOLETE] Z-Wave.me, Popp, & Devolo Wireless wall Controller & Key Fob (EU), with button controller dimming apps and CoRE integration

current device handler: 1.7.4, updated: 28/03/2017 current smartapp: 1.6, updated: 25/01/2016 What you can do with this This allows you to correctly set up Z-Wave.me, Popp, & Devolo Wall controllers and Key Fobs. The Device type alone will mean that they work as you (& ST!) would expect and plays nice with other apps, and if dimming is important to you this accompanying app will allow you to have dim events performed whilst rocker switches are held down. Other actions (like double clicks and click-holds) can be used with the Smartapp as well as CoRE. Some info on the Wall Controllers These wall controllers are very cool. You can buy the inside part, cover plate, and rocker switches separately, so you have a hell of a lot of flexibility in terms of how they end up looking. For example,…

So while SmartThings may not support as many Z wave devices straight out of the box as some other systems, it offers customers a really unusual degree of flexibility to add their own device handlers, thus significantly extending device choice.