Today I saw the new Nanoleaf module for the shapes on the IFA,
It’s running on zigbee, so I asked me, if this would be an interesting product to integrate in ST via an edge driver. This could be perfect because the normal controller runs over the cloud, so it has a delay, when you control it. With zigbee the delay is shorter. And scene control could be easier.
But I’m not a developer, so I can’t create edge drivers via lua.
It would be nice, if somebody could help me.
And sorry, I’m German, so my english is not the best…
In principle, yes, I think a SmartThings Edge driver for this module should be possible. The fact that it uses Zigbee is a good starting point, but unfortunately creating a driver is not quite as simple as adding the device model to an existing driver.
For the basic functions I would be fairly optimistic. If the module behaves like other recent Hue lights, things such as on/off, brightness, color and color temperature are likely exposed through standard Zigbee clusters and should be relatively straightforward to support.
The more interesting part is the gradient control. Hue gradient products use additional manufacturer-specific Zigbee commands for things such as multiple color points, effects and combined gradient states. Much of this protocol is already understood, so there is a realistic chance that we could expose considerably more than just a single RGB color in SmartThings. I would not expect individual control of every Nanoleaf panel, though; Hue itself seems to treat the complete Shapes installation more like one gradient light with a limited number of color points.
Hue Entertainment/Sync and features such as MotionAware are a different matter and should not be expected from an Edge driver. Those depend on functionality in the Hue ecosystem rather than ordinary Zigbee light control.
There is also one very basic question that needs to be answered first: whether the module can be paired directly with a SmartThings Hub. Philips only documents the Hue setup procedure at the moment, so that needs to be tested.
Do you already have the Wall Light Module?
If you do, I would be interested in having a look at it. We would first need to pair it with SmartThings and collect its Zigbee device information and some logs. From that I could see exactly which endpoints and clusters it exposes and build an initial driver.
Without having access to an actual device and somebody willing to test it, developing a useful driver would unfortunately be almost impossible. With a device and a tester, however, I think this is definitely worth investigating.
Thank you for the information,
You’re right it would be hard to control special effects and single zones and creating a driver for it.
And I didn’t bougt this module yet, but I thougt of an other advantage of it. On the normal controller is runnig normal Linux, wich needs much energy, maybe the hue module saves more energy, but I’m at the moment at vacation, so I couldn’t test how much standby energy the normal module needs. Are there other ways then with a driver for this hue module to control scenes via ST, maybe with the http driver, but I don’t know. At the moment I can only control all shapes at the time.
A dedicated driver would be easy compared to anything related to http.
Do you have a SmartThings hub?
We can take a closer look at all of that once you’re back from vacation and have bought the device.