Hello,
I’m excited about Hub 2.0. But there’s not much info out there.
I’m a electronics hobbyist and like to make my own wireless sensors. I’ve been looking for a device that bridges zigbee and z-wave to ethernet. With Hub2.0 local support, will I be able to write apps to do call-backs on a REST API when zigbee door contact sensors open/close?
Is there a local (LOCAL!) API on the hub that I can use to turn on zigbee lightbulbs?
What is the authentication/security scheme like? Is that part cloud based?
I wish it were that way. But with hub v1, all interactions with devices and their responses route to cloud first and all interactions with 3rd parties are done at the cloud level.
I would love to be able to access something on the local hub without leaving the network, but I haven’t heard anything from anyone at ST that this will be a feature anytime soon. It has been asked for many times over the last year.
I guess it’s a business decision. Opening up a local API means more chances for someone somewhere to get their hub “hacked”. But it also opens up so many more sensor options. LoRa integration. All kinds of things.
I talk to my local devices that are joined to my SmartThings hub with a little ZigBee USB dongle plugged into my Windows workstation. I can completely communicate with all my ZigBee devices even my Hue Bulbs. Is this what your looking for? You don’t have to talk to the hub to get access to your devices you just have to be on the same ZigBee network?
I absolutely think that local Hub v2 integration would be amazing. In fact I see a future where an RPI is connected and works as a rules engine(of course this is assuming no rules engine has been created by ST). This would be right up my alley as I love Linux and crontab is so easy and reliable. This also would give a great platform to capture logs and maintain logs looking for errors in order to improve our own smartapps.
Wow I’m getting more excited the more I talk about this. Hey ST can you weigh in and either crush my dreams or give me some hope.
Kind of. I’d like to be able to do control via a Raspberry Pi, but also get zigbee sensor feedback into my own thing (not just SmartThings hub). But I’m willing to use a Windows SBC w/ zigbee usb adapter if that’s what’s needed to get the data out. In which case, it doesn’t seem like the ST hub is of any value at all.
What zigbee USB adapter do you use, and what’s the software end of it? I’d love some more details on how you’re using that to control the zigbee bulbs.
Well, that’s kind of what OpenHAB is. The missing piece is the zigbee portion. OpenHAB doesn’t talk to USB zigbee adapters as far as I know. Only z-wave.
I use digi’s XStick2 ZB http://www.digi.com/pdf/ds_xstick.pdf with my Windows 7 PC. For the software side I wrote a ZigBee DLL a couple of years ago that allows me send and receive ZigBee cluster commands. I have since ported that DLL over to a SPIN object so it works with the Propeller. If I was going to do this on a Pi I would probably look into into loading windows 10 on it and porting my DLL over or get a USB from another vendor that has an ZigBee stack ready to go.
You absolutely still need the hub if you want to control your device with a Smartphone or have it integrate with other devices. Remember to setup a ZigBee HA network you have to have a coordinator that is a trust center to give out network keys and addresses. The SmartThings hub does a great job of that.
I have been lurking around SmartThings for a while waiting for hub v2. I have been using HomeGenie software on my PC the past year (also runs on RPi). I have a few old X10 devices that got me by the past year (mainly just setting up some cron-based light timers when we were away from the house more than a day). I don’t want to spend $40-60 per light switch for z-wave (which HG supports via USB Z-stick). Was hoping to find a way for HG to control $15 Zigbee bulbs but it doesn’t support Zigbee. I tried OepnHAB a couple times and it was a pain in the neck I thought. HG is much easier and allows writing plugins with a point&click script, or C# or Python or Ruby.
I’ve got a couple arduinos (actually one is Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 running arduino). Its in my garage with 2 cheap magnetic door sensors for garage doors, motion, temp and humidity. The other monitors my basement sump pump plus motion/temp/humidity and rear door. HG polls each device via web server and they send simple JSON data to HG, which it parses super-easy. I can’t see spending $30 on one z-wave door sensor that does only that; when one simple arduino can do so much more. Only problem going forward is finding a nice enclosure/box for all these arduinos I’d like to scatter around our house. Ball of wires is okay in garage and basement, but not gonna work in the family room too much longer
My long term plan has been to switch to STv2 so I don’t need PC running all the time plus get all the radios in one box (and hopefully still be able to hack around with code and arduinos). Ditch X10, use the Zigbee bulbs. I might exploe using X10 via an arduino so I can keep ReX-10 the RoboDog at least.
Arduinos will hopefully still serve web JSON data to ST. I played around with the ST IDE and it looks like I can pretty easily replace my HomeGenie C# plugins with ST SmartApps polling each Arduino web server. Only question is if I can have ST recognize my arduino sensors as actual devices so I can use them to control things (arduino motion sensor turns on Zigbee lightbulbs via ST hub, sump pump problem sends SMS to phone, etc). I don’t want to pay for a ST ThingShield for each either when a $10 ESP8266 device has WiFI builtin.
