We are happy to announce a new and improved integration between the SmartThings and Home Assistant ecosystems.
Recently we made changes to how PAT tokens can be used on the platform. Unfortunately, those changes resulted in some users unexpectedly losing their connections between SmartThings and Home Assistant. We have been working closely with the Home Assistant team to develop a new integration that should resolve this problem and we hope will be an overall improvement to SmartThings and Home Assistant users.
Some highlights of this new integration:
A new Oauth based authentication flow. Which means a PAT token is no longer required and no more manual refreshing of tokens.
A new eventing flow. With the nature of this new flow some previous limitations of the previous integration will no longer be a problem. Users who have split devices across SmartThings locations to handle subscription limits should now be able to consolidate devices to a single location and still get all the events you care about delivered to your Home Assistant installation.
In line rate limits for control. With this new centralized integration, the rate limits being used are much more in line with how users would interact with the SmartThings and Home Assistant platforms. Which means less âToo Many Requestsâ errors and more reliability for everyone.
The full release of the new integration is expected early next month, but if you want to join the beta release you can do so now (steps to do this here). A special shoutout to the Home Assistant team and all the work they have done to help make this new integration a reality!
Thatâs great to hear - I will likely have devices split between SmartThings and HA for a very long time, so itâs super helpful to have them work well together.
The huge advantage of the new integration in my opinion is not having to make your Home Assistant instance visible to the Internet, at least according to HA. No opening ports, setting tunnels or paying for HA Cloud subscription if you want to get device events from SmartThings.
I know that was already discussed in other threads but itâs worth remembering it here. In fact, I guess thatâs probably the result of both parties working together and something specific for HA since the official way to receive events is providing a webhook, isnât it?
Thatâs indeed the code, in the old method you had to tell SmartThings the URL of your HA server for them to connect (the SmartApp webhook), so the instance had to be visible on the Internet.
Now, apparently, the URL is provided by SmartThings in the events subscription response and HA just connects to it to receive the events. That method seems to be not documented so might be something made for HA given itâs not a cloud platform.
This differentiates HA from ST: community developers arenât left out and are actually welcome. The HA core team does AMAs every once in a while, upcoming changes are communicated early on, everything is open-source, documentation is up-to-date, âŚ
And while we have Samsung Members to report bugs, they have this:
Thatâs certainly the only publicly documented/demonstrated method for Webhook SmartApps and OAuth-In apps that I am aware of.
What else is available if you get into a dialogue with SmartThings is another matter. The Samsung Automation Studio has an SSE option as an alternative to acting as a Webhook SmartApp. What the user level Alexa and Google integrations get up to is anybodies guess.
Itâs a lot better than it was when I started using SmartThings. Then new users were being directed to the ânewâ app and the ânewâ platform even though SmartThings was 99+% about the legacy platform. Imagine the current SmartThings app only running on higher end phones with little or no recognisable SmartThings functionality, and a Developer Workspace that had literally nothing for community developers and didnât even acknowledge the existence of hub devices at all.
I am intrigued by the HA fix and also slightly irritated by it.
Today, I received a response to a support request in which I asked why the Aqara H2 Switch is not displayed in SmartThings Energy. I had mentioned that the device has the necessary capabilities and attributes and that other devices of this type work. I wanted to know if the device might need to be added to a whitelist.
Response
Your request indicates that you are experiencing difficulties with the SmartThings application.
Since this may be caused by an internal software issue that was not properly updated with the software update and the new SmartThings version, please follow these steps to try to resolve the issue:
Open the âSmartThingsâ application > Click on the three horizontal lines (More) > Settings (gear icon) > Automatically update devices and services.
Then, go to Settings > Apps > SmartThings > Tap on âForce Stopâ > Storage > Clear Cache.
In HA I could look into it or ask the core developers directly.
it seemed based off documentation that it still goes through the Internet instead of local