I have a Sinope zigbee thermostat that connects and works flawlessly with my ST v3 hub, and it seemed like an awesome zigbee repeater too. Unfortunately it was too awesome of a repeater, AND it didn’t play well with my aqara devices. Any device connected to the hub after the thermostat was on would drop out not long after, and even if everything was paired while the thermostat was off, once turned back on after some days devices would randomly fall out.
So I’m thinking, the solution could be to just put the thermostat on a second ST hub.
I see locally someone selling a STH-ETH-200 (v2 right?) hub for $20. Seems like a good deal, I just wanted to run it by you guys to make sure there isn’t something I’m missing here.
I plan to connect the second hub to my account and add it to this location, from research it seems you’re now allowed to have more than one hub per location, and then I’ll configure it to use a different zigbee frequency and pair just the thermostat to it.
That should work, just be aware that any automation that includes devices connected to two different hubs will have to run in the cloud, the automation itself can no longer run locally. But the edge drivers will still run locally.
Another alternative would be to wait until aqara has a hub available that acts as a matter bridge and smartthings is updated to handle matter bridges, and then you could add the aqara devices to their own hub and bring them over to smartthings locally that way. But that’s depending on several if‘s and the option isn’t here yet. Just wanted to mention it, though.
Awesome, thank you for signing off on this haha!
And that’s interesting about the Aqara devices, I’ll keep an ear out for anything of the sort coming out!
It’s ready on the Aqara side for the M2 hub right now, but smartthings doesn’t have their side done yet. 