Lutron Caseta or Clearconnect RF support

If you can put them into an activity it should work.

Don’t be fooled by the Harmony’s statement like I was. Their integration is cloud to cloud with Lutron. You will need to buy Lutron hub to make Caseta work with Harmony.

And managing 3 hubs is a nightmare. Every week something doesn’t work and you end up spending hours reseting connections between hubs.

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Huh, that’s not cool, another hub to be managed? That’s another $120 plus I don’t like cloud based stuff for my HA that’s why I went with veralite in the first place. Hoping ST2 local control be a positive experience.

Me too, I have started replacing my Caseta switches. Don’t get me wrong, they are a great product, but I like ST more. Plus trying to unclutter my HA set up to use one hub instead of several.

Thanks for the heads-up, then maybe me buying Caseta is not a good idea until ST supports it.

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Did you get GE zwave dimmers???

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Alright, time for a report. I received my new SmartThings v2 hub this weekend. I was able to move all of my devices from my Staples Connect hub to the SmartThings hub (except for my 3 Lutron Pico remotes). This evening I sat out to add my Staples Connect hub as a secondary Z-Wave controller to the SmartThings hub so that I could try to use the Lutron Caseta Pico remotes on my Staples Connect hub to control Z-Wave (and other common devices) on my SmartThings hub.

I’m happy to report that I was SUCCESSFUL. I was able to turn on and off a Z-Wave light that is paired with my SmartThings hub with the Lutron Pico remote. I recorded a video of the process that I used along with demonstrating control of the light with both SmartThings and a Lutron Pico remote.

NOTE 1: Initially, I was not successful when I tried with an existing Staples Connect setup (with the remotes already paired). In this scenario, the remotes disappeared from the setup after I had the Staples Connect learn the SmartThings Z-Wave network. I needed to restore to factory settings then learn the SmartThings Z-Wave network first. After I had identified all of the Z-Wave devices from SmartThings I could pair the Lutron Pico remotes and successfully create activities.

NOTE 2: Staples Connect will only work with Caseta flavor of ClearConnect from Lutron. That means it will NOT work with Radio RA2, etc.

Please ignore the shaky video, wife coughing in the background, and multiple edits. Also please ignore any silly looking apps that appear on the iPhone in the video. It belongs to my kid. I wasn’t confident this was going to work. Otherwise I would have made a higher quality video to share. Either way, I hope it helps someone out.

If anyone else gives this a shot, please reply back with how well it worked out for you.

YouTube - SmartThings and Lutron via Staples Connect

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Very interesting. Thanks for posting all the details!

So ultimately, this works pretty much the same way as adding a tap switch for a Phillips hue bridge will work. That is you get some button control, but it’s very limited compared to something like the Aeon Minimote.

When used with SmartThings, the Aeon Minimote can:

  1. toggle Z wave devices on or off, either individually or in groups

  2. toggle zigbee devices on or off, either individually or in groups

  3. toggle a mix of Zigbee and Z wave and cloud service devices (like WeMos or TCP) on or off

  4. toggle a virtual switch on or off

  5. run a routine

  6. change mode

As your video demonstrates, SmartThings plus a Staples connect hub plus a pico remote can:

  1. toggle a Z wave device on or off. I’m not sure if you can toggle a group of zwave devices or not.

  2. may be able to control installed Lutron Caseta light switches from the handheld remote, but will not be able to include them in SmartThings routines or SmartApps. This hasn’t been tested yet though.

As I mentioned, fairly similar to the Phillips tap for Hues.

SmartThings plus a Philips Hue Bridge plus a Tap can

  1. toggle the lights controlled by the Hue bridge on or off from the tap. But the tap cannot control any other devices, change mode, etc.

I like the form factor of the pico a lot, but I don’t think I’d buy a Staples connect hub just to get this level of integration.

I still have my fingers crossed that one of the new little Zigbee switches (one from Lutron and one from Philips That just came out this month will be able to be used like the minimote. But we’ll just have to wait and see.

Have you tried using an automated routine from the Staples connect to change the light and seeing if the status gets changed over on the SmartThings side?

JD, any clue if the Hue dimmer switches available in US as of now? I couldn’t find any information on that except sometimes in September. That will solve all my dimmer issues as nearly 90% of my bulbs are hues or lux’s.

The one thing I like that you yourself have pointed out about the MiniMote, that would make me choose it over the Hue remote and the Lutron one, is that it’s a Z-Wave device and can in certain scenarios be used to help do a Z-Wave exclude on devices that may be too far from the hub.

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edited to update Now available in the U.S., as I know @smart knows, since he has about six of them! :sunglasses:

Yeah, I was running Staples Connect as a secondary Z-Wave controller to V1 hub for a while and was able to control lights from both SC and ST. The problem is, as with all Z-Wave secondary controllers, (as far as ST is concerned) that in most cases ST is unaware of the device status changes done via the secondary. I.e. when you turn on the light using secondary, ST will still report the light as “off” until it polls its status several minutes later or until you refresh it manually.

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Yes, I agree with everything you say. If I didn’t already have a Staples Connect along with the Pico remotes, I probably wouldn’t bother. Staples does, however, have good deals on their hub from time to time. I would expect some deals coming up around Black Friday that will give you the hub for free if you buy a couple of devices. That might make it a bit more worth it.

I did try an automated routine on the Staples connect side. I had the lights turn on at a specific time. When I looked in the SmartThings app, the status had updated appropriately. I’ve noticed it takes a few seconds from time to time, but it works very well every time I’ve looked.

Since the video I have set up the remaining two Pico remotes I had, giving me all 3 in working state. Thus far I am very happy using the two systems together. While SmartThings is definitely my main system going forward, it’s nice to have the additional functionality available to me in a somewhat integrated fashion.

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I tried this exactly like the thread and the video. My Lutron devices are still not showing up in ST. I have the the V2 ST hub and the SC hub as a secondary controller. Can you tell me if there is anything I might be missing?

Hi Kevin. With this method the Lutron devices will not show in ST. You will need to program the SC with activities to control the ZWave devices that now show up in both SC and ST.

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That makes sense now. Thanks

How did you control the Lutron device in Smartthings?

He’s not.

This is the set up.

He has a SmartThings hub as the primary Z wave controller. Say it can control a Z wave switch in the living room. It can’t even see the lutron switch in the hallway.

He also has a Staples connect hub which he has connected to the SmartThings installation as a secondary Zwave controller. It can see the same zwave switch in the living room that smartthings can. It can also see the Lutron switch in the hallway.

The pico is working with the Staples connect hub. When he presses the button on the pico, it can turn on either the Zwave switch or the Lutron switch because that’s how it works with Staples. The turn on status information is not sent directly to smartthings, but since it checks the Z wave switch status occasionally it gets updated for that one. Smartthings never knows the status of the Lutron switch, doesn’t even know it exists. Cannot include it in routines. And the pico remote cannot trigger a SmartThings routine the way an aeon minimote can.

So basically you’ve created overlapping networks which share the Z wave devices, but nothing else. And to do that you need two hubs, one from SmartThings and one from Staples.

Both Lutron Caseta and smartThings have IFTTT channels, so you can get some indirect control that way using virtual switches if you want to add Caseta devices to smartthings routines without needing a Staples hub as well. But there is usually some lag. It would be fine for time based routines like “turn on at 6 PM” or something like that. :sunglasses:

Awsome, Thanks for the info.

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Greetings, It seems that both SmartThings, and Lutron’s Caseta are supporting Apple HomeKit. Assuming both a SmartThings Hub and a Caseta Smart Bridge Pro, will this solve the world’s problems?
I’m thinking that ultimately that should allow Siri, etc. to access both systems via voice control, but…
Could that also somehow function as an intermediary, so that, for example, sensors talking to the SmartThings hub, such as motion, could ultimately trigger HomeKit to command certain lights to turn on via the the Caseta Bridge?
Any thoughts? In other words, (detailed Apple Homekit info seems to still be hard to find) could HomeKit function as a “bridge” between the the two “bridges”?