Hi, I have had a Samsung smart things hub for a while now but never broke off into having little devices around the home. I recently had picked up 2 Innr zigbee outlets and a Samsung button in the hopes of using it to power off then power on my router and modem just the click of a button.
Seems like the turning off is fine, but the turning back on is giving me issues. I thought zigbee worked without internet but it seems like it loses connection to these devices every time I test it out.
Am I doing something wrong or did I just pick up the wrong products?
Zigbee works without the Internet, but the smartthings cloud does not. And smartthings is still primarily a cloud-based system. Even the smartthings mobile app requires an active Internet connection in order to do anything with your hub, even if both are on the same Wi-Fi. They didn’t have to design it that way, but they did.
So if you need a system which can work well without the Internet, smartthings just isn’t it.
That said, there are a few things you can set up to work without the Internet. But at the present time it’s limited to automations you create through the official “smartlighting“ smartapp feature, not through the regular automation option. And even then, only some devices can work locally.
I’ll leave it to other people to explain how to create smart lighting automations if you don’t know how, I’m pretty tired today. But that’s what you’ve run into. it’s not a zigbee issue at all: it’s a smartthings issue. There are other Zigbee hubs where the exact same automation would be able to run without the Internet.
There are hubs that don’t use any Internet at all, but that’s not what most people are looking for because these days people want to be able to use a phone app when they are away from home and voice assistants like Amazon echo or Google home.
But there are a number of hubs where You might need an Internet connection to set up new devices, For control when you are away from home, and for voice assistants, but where once you have rules set up, everything within home can run without the Internet. (whether you need the Internet to set up rules just varies a lot.)
Some of the more popular include the Hue bridge, apple’s HomeKit, Insteon, the ikea Tradfri gateway, and Amazon Echo Plus (Which has a zigbee hub inside). There are also some systems from smaller companies like Hubitat and Devolo. The specific devices that work with each of those systems vary quite a bit.
Hubitat was started by some former smartthings customers A couple of years ago specifically to provide more local processing, and has the closest match to the devices that work with smartthings, although there’s still some variance.
But again, it comes down to the exact details of what you were looking for.
Guess I’m not really sure what I want to do with it yet. My use for it that I explained is pretty minimal but I’m sure i would add a ton on once I see all the benefits.
Just want something that is useful without internet since my only use currently is turning outlets on and off which powers the router and modem
If that is your use case, this might be a better product for you.
Smartthings really won’t do that use case well. There are plenty of things it will do well once you have solid internet and there are a lot of projects posted in the forums if you need inspiration.
