Hi,
I have a SmartThings hub (IM6001V3P02) for a long time and I bought now an S95D Samsung tv (it will arrive on Thursday).
The TV be used as a SmartThings hub, right?
Since i have a z-wave plug on a place where the signal between it and my hub doesn’t work, I was thinking about moving the hub next to the plug in order to be able to turn on/off, and the TV for the rest.
Is it possible?
And how can I add the TV as the main hub, and the other as a secondary one?
Thanks!
Is this one problem plug your only Z-Wave device? Only the TV hub will not support Z-Wave.
If you want to combine the V3 hub and the TV into a hub group, which is pretty much what you will be guided to do these days, it will have to be the V3 that is the primary doing all your device and automation handling with the TV basically providing repeating services. That is because of the Z-Wave requirement. I don’t know what the specs are on the TV hub relative to the V3 so you could feel like the tail is wagging the dog. You also need the hubs to be able to communicate over Zigbee to repeat it. Not so sure about Thread. I’d hope the TV would actually act an additional Thread Border Router over the LAN rather than just as a Thread device.
If you don’t combine the hubs in a group you have to treat them as two separate hubs. That means you may need to select the hub to use whenever you pair devices, and that automations that use devices on both hubs would run in the cloud rather than on your hub. That may not bother you in the slightest.
Hi,
That’s not really good news because I only have Z-Wave.
When I started I bought other devices (also Z-Wave and one or two, Zigbee, if not mistaken) but since I moved to the current house, I’m just using two smart plugs for turning on cameras to see (99.9% of the times, my wife… 
) what my dogs are doing when we’re not at home.
So, one thing I could probably do would be to buy Zigbee (or Matter; don’t know if it’s worth it) smart plugs.
Regarding the TV itself, I can only find that it has a SmartThings hub (so, not just an app) compatible with Matter and HCA devices. And on the US Samsung website, it basically says “SmartThings Hub / Matter Hub / IOT-Sensor”
Oh, I didn’t know that expression “the tail is wagging the dog.” (I’m from Portugal, not US) but it’s really funny. 
Thanks!
The TV ST hub is a software app running on the TV’s operating system. It has built-in Zigbee support, so it will support native Wi-Fi devices (think Bose, Sonos, etc), Edge LAN driver devices (vEdge Creator virtual devices, etc), Matter over Wi-Fi devices, and Matter over Thread devices (built-in TBR).
It’s not clear whether it’s eligible to be used in a hub group or not. Like all Samsung appliance based hubs, it offers no support for Z-Wave. Based on the omission of Z-Wave from the ST Station as well, ST seems to be moving away from Z-Wave as a supported home automation protocol.
Yes, unfortunately, Samsung is stopping the support for Z-Wave on newer devices.
Fortunately, with the hub v3 it still works.
As for the TV, Samsung leads to believe that it has an hub built in, at least according to the description of the TV.
Well, when I receive the TV, I’ll have to check it properly. Z-Wave i know that it doesn’t support.
I have a Samsung refrigerator with the external Zigbee/Thread dongle. While the TV has that radio built-in, the ST hub functionality is still just an app running on the TV.
The help information in ‘Manage hubs’ explicitly states that Samsung TVs and Family Hubs are eligible for hub groups, but when you actually try to create them anything with a dongle is excluded. So that suggests to me that TVs and Family Hubs that don’t require dongles should be fine.
I don’t think I have been able to confirm how Thread is supported on secondary hubs (of any type). Ideally the secondary hub would become a second TBR on the primary hub’s Thread network and I can’t think why that wouldn’t be the case. However they also make a big deal about distance between the primary and secondary hubs without qualifying it only applies to Zigbee, which does make me reluctantly consider the possibility the secondary hub is just acting as an ordinary router rather than a border router.
A Samsung higher-up made it pretty clear that Samsung were going down the Matter route for their ‘Hubs Everywhere’ project and that Zigbee was really just along for the ride because the chipsets they were currently using supported both Thread and Zigbee. She showed no enthusiasm for it in itself. Z-Wave didn’t seem to be of any import.
The Station is a Samsung wireless charger with a built-in hub. It really isn’t any different from other Samsung appliances such as TVs, fridges, monitors and soundbars in having built in hub support.
Unless other companies choose to create SmartThings hubs with Z-Wave support, or perhaps SmartThings moves towards offering the hub as a software only solution, I can see Z-Wave being harder for SmartThings to support going ahead. However the same could easily be true of Zigbee.
Yes, but I think you are visualising a ‘hub’ as if were a dedicated hardware module. I believe it would be more true to say that it is a software package, or an app if you like. The V2 and the V3 hubs are designed with the hardware to run the SmartThings hub software. The TV is designed with the hardware to do TV things as well.
True, in as much as it’s all software. I think the difference for me is that the standalone hubs OS and drivers are all based on a single programming language (Lua) and are a collection of libraries and modules. The TV/fridge hubs are an app written in one programming language (Lua) that runs on a completely different OS (Tizen) and is not a completely integrated solution. This becomes apparent when you encounter things like the Thread stack becoming completely unresponsive on the fridge hub but running flawlessly on the Station (both running fw 54.13).
Are they? I always imagined the core was largely, but not exclusively, written in Rust. Certainly a lot of the Rules stuff is.
I have to say that all of you have been very helpful!
Thanks a lot!
Hi,
Just an heads up.
I received the S95D yesterday and already played a little with it.
The SmartThings that we see on Samsung Hub is in fact an app but it let us control Z-Wave smart plugs.
I found an option to use the TV as a hub but it shows a warning that all the devices will be deleted and then I have to reconnect each one again.
Decided not to try it out because I don’t want to have the hassle of setup everything again. And, if Samsung doesn’t support anymore Z-Wave, it would be a waste of time and patience.
Thanks
I have a hub group consisting of four hubs: a SmartThings v3 hub as primary, and as secondaries two SmartThings Stations and a soundbar hub.
In the Nanoleaf app’s Thread Network overview they are all listed as separate External Border Routers.
Thanks, I was hoping someone with the right tool would have checked.
Holy crap (sorry for my language) I don’t even have thread available in my OLED G8 hub but a soundbar hub has it.
It sucks when I tried to use it with a third-party TBR, I can pair my Nanoleafs with the Alexa Echos as TBR for the first time, then the Alexa thread dead because I’ve change country with my Amazon account and all the Echos forgot their thread credentials, and the hub in the OLED monitor cannot pair with Alexa’s matter paring codes again. I even tried putting all of them in HomePod but no luck in paring with my hub.
And I don’t even have an option to buy a regular SmartThings dongle/hub here in Canada.
Regarding the TV Hub in general I suppose it is a virtual machine or a sandbox (maybe Docker?) running independently from the Tizen OS, because it still runs after deleting the app, unless you explicitly disable the hub.