the following applies only to tuyamade Zigbee devices that you want to connect directly to a smartthings/Aeotec hub.
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It does not apply to Wi-Fi devices or to devices that will be bridged via matter. Or to devices that are connected to a tuya hub and then brought in through the “Tuya smart” or smartlife integration. Just ones using zigbee that you want to connect without using a tuya hub.
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These devices can be sold under more than a dozen different brand names. They are usually very inexpensive with cool features, but no independent safety certifications.
STEP ONE: DOES YOUR ST HUB HAVE A ZIGBEE RADIO?
First things first, just to get this out-of-the-way because it came up in another thread.
In order to use Zigbee devices of any brand with SmartThings, at the time of this writing you must have either a standalone SmartThings hub or an Aeotec “works as a SmartThings hub“ hub, or some of the 2024 or newer Samsung appliances/televisions that have a Zigbee chip built in. Or an older Samsung smart television or appliance plus the optional add-on Zigbee dongle.
All of the other Samsung “hub everywhere” options, including the soundbars, the Samsung smart televisions without the dongle, the family hub refrigerators without the dongle, etc that were built before 2024 don’t have a Zigbee radio. So they can’t talk to Zigbee devices.
So step one is to make sure that you do have a hub that has a Zigbee radio. Now onto the Tuya details.
STEP TWO: THE TUYA UNIVERSE
Tuya is a huge device manufacturer which makes devices which are then rebranded and sold by other companies. There are literally dozens of companies selling tuya made devices, including Moes, yagusmart, btf, zemismart, and many more. Sometimes the devices have slightly different firmware, and they typically have a different “fingerprint“ which can make it tricky to get them to work with SmartThings if it’s a fingerprint that has never been added to the existing edge drivers.
How can you tell if it’s a tuya-made device? Usually the product description will mention either a Tuya gateway or the “smartlife“ app. If the device works with either of those, it probably started life in a Tuya factory.
So… can you get a Tuya-made Zigbee device to work directly with SmartThings? Maybe. Tuya uses a lot of proprietary code which then has to be translated into something that SmartThings can understand. The official edge drivers written by Samsung don’t do those translations. But there are some community created edge drivers that can do it for some models (but not all).
And then smartthings has its own layer of proprietary code, which are the edge drivers, so you have to find the right one. And if it doesn’t include the fingerprint of your specific device, you’ll have to get the edge driver author to add it.
Process:
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add the device to SmartThings. If it doesn’t add as at least a “Zigbee thing,” there’s a problem with the device itself. It might just need to be reset. But it might be defective: it happens.
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once you have it added, you need to get the fingerprint (The combination of manufacturer code and model number.) The following FAQ shows you where those fields are. If they happen to be blank or all zeros, the pairing failed, and you will need to pair it again until you see actual numbers/letters in those fields.
FAQ: Manufacturer/Model Shows All Zeroes
- now there’s a step specific to Tuya devices. You need to download a community diagnostic tool, the “zigbee thing mc”edge driver.
Follow this link to subscribe to Mariano‘s channel (the “MC“ you will see on a lot of custom drivers are his initials).
https://api.smartthings.com/invitation-web/accept?id=6b68563b-1905-4654-8d2b-e677a2997424
Enroll your hub and then select the “Zigbee thing MC“ edge driver to download it.
- switch your device from the standard “Zigbee thing” edge driver to Mariano’s.
FAQ: How to change to a different edge driver
- now you will be able to see the “clusters“ that this device supports. If you see EF00 , then it’s using proprietary Tuya clusters. Those are a pain.
You might be able to get it work with the following edge driver, but no guarantees. Read the first post carefully, it has a lot of information you will need.
[ST Edge] Personal Tuya Devices - Generic EF00 Device
Ask any further questions about that edge driver in that author thread.
- if you don’t see EF00, Then it might work with a more standard edge driver, but one created by a community member.
So put a request post in the following thread. Read the first post in that thread carefully. Your request needs to include the fingerprint and the list of clusters.
If someone knows of an edge driver that will work with it, or if it just needs to have its fingerprint added to an existing edge driver, a community developer will hopefully respond there.
Then you’ll be able to follow the link to that channel and subscribe to that edge driver.
Post Requests for Zigbee Edge Drivers Here (community-created)
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You can delete the “Zigbee thing MC” edge Driver from your hub once you have downloaded the new custom edge Driver. It’s just used as a diagnostic tool.
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now that you finally have the right edge driver on your hub, You’re ready to add your device and it should match to that new custom edge driver.
Note that in the past We typically just switched from one Zigbee edge driver to another in the SmartThings app, but the idiosyncrasies of the tuya-made devices plus some changes to the SmartThings platform now mean that in order to get the device to work correctly you have to delete it from your SmartThings account and then re-add it so that it will pick up the new edge driver and get configured correctly as part of the initial add process. Unfortunately, that also means that you will have to re-create any routines you had that were using it, but since the reason for getting the new custom edge driver is that the device wasn’t working with the old one, hopefully that won’t be too annoying.
Here are Mariano‘s instructions for this step:
- Once your device fingerprints has been added to a community driver, do not change to new driver from Zigbee Thing stock or Zigbee Thing Mc. This could cause your device to not work properly or appear offline after a few hours, due to your device not being configured correctly.
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Follow these steps:
.- Install the community driver with the new fingerprints added to your Hub
- Uninstall the device with the App
- Check or put the device in pairing mode
- Add new Device in the App and use the Search nearby devices option.
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9) once you have tested the device and it is working correctly, you can now re-create any routines you had to delete as part of this process. And hopefully the device will now work the way you first expected.
