Newbie Here with SmartThings and need some guidance

Wiki Projects & Stories
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Good Evening Everyone!!! I hope this finds you well! I have a pretty complicated setup and I would like to make it more efficient.

I apologize if this first part seems lengthy I will do my best to keep it short. In my Master Bedroom I have:
Cox Cable Internet with a 150 down going via gigabit to my Linksys E4200, then into my Linksys EA6500 (being used as a switch/accesspoint). Plugged into those I have my APC SUA1000 with Network & Environment Monitoring, 8ch Zmodo DVR (with 5 cameras), Liftmaster MyQ Gateway, Cisco Meraki M18 access point, Arlo Base station (with 3 cameras), SmartThings hub.

While connected to 2.5 or 5 ghz on the E4200 max speed is about 60mbps down
While connected to the EA6500 throughput is much better.
Tried using only EA6500 as primary router but it’s Nat Loopback doesn’t work so for ease of use for my wife and the IP Cam’s I have both setup and functioning

We usually use the IP Cam Viewer Pro App for the D-Link’s, Foscam’s, and the CCTV
Arlo for Arlo

Plex running on one of the home servers, and on a laptop

Around the house is
I also have 2 Foscam FI9821W’s (a V1 and a V2)
3 D-Link DCS-930L (That I won)
Wink Hub
Belkin HomeBase
About 8-9 Laptops/Netbooks
5 Tablets
4 Smartphones
3 Xbox 360’s
1 PS3
Fire TV
3 Roku Sticks
1 Chromecast
1 Roku 2 XDS (Very out of date)
Ring Stick Up Cam (on the way be here tomorrow)

In my loft I have:
D-Link DAP1522 Wifi to Eth Bridge
To an APC SU1400
An APC Network Controlled PDU
16 port switch
2x HP Home Servers (Also with WIFI Dongles for backup internet connection if the DAP drops)
Pogoplug
Laptop Dock
LG BD Player
LG SmartTv

I have a 2Gig 2 Alarm System Panel (3g connection) through Surety DIY & Alarm.com
16 Door/Window Sensors
3 Glass Break Sensors
3 Motion Detectors
1 Carbon Monoxide Sensor
1 Smoke/Heat/Freeze Detector
1 TS1 Separate Touchscreen
1 Motion Sensor with Built in Camera
1 Connected Doorbell
1 Panic Button
2 Keyfobs
Supports Z-Wave & rules based on motion, sunrise/sunset, Thermostat scheduling based on motion or alarm status, and during fire automatically shuts off AC to prevent pumping smoke around.

My Q Connected through Alarm.com

Z-Wave Equipment
1 Leviton Dimmer (Kitchen Lights Florescent, would love to change to dim-able LED’s)
1 Leviton Dimmer (Kitchen Table 5, 5w Dimable LED Bulbs)
1 Leviton On/Off Switch (Front Patio)
1 GE Zwave Switch with Companion for 3 way switch
1 Schlage FE599 Lever Lock on Master Bedroom
1 CT100 Z-Wave Programmable Thermostat (working as a z-wave repeater as it’s powered from the AC)

Also looking to control about 4-7 Fans with lights Lights haven’t decided how to do that, if I am remembering the wiring correctly it was run with just Black/Wight/Ground so no extra wire for separate powering of the Light from the fan. Was debating about the mini 2 relay zwave boxes.

(I also have an extra Leviton Dimmer switch I haven’t decided where to put it)

Zigbee Devices
3 Leaksmart water/temperature sensors
4 Lightify Tunable White Bulbs
4 Ge Link Bulbs
1 Lutron Zigbee Remote

Other Wink Devices:
GE Quirky Spotter v1
Quirky Nibmus

So much for equipment list and setup:

I had the 2Gig and the Wink Linked via Zwave, the 2Gig was setup as an additional controller. The devices were automatically cloned though both and so also show up in the Alarm.com App and the Wink app. The moment I added in the SmartThings into the Network Via Zwave the devices disappeared from Wink. Luckily they didn't disappear from my alarm.com setup. 

I'm the one who installed and configured everything (including the alarm). 

I would Love for all my Zigbee/Zwave Devices to be seen in both systems. I currently have stringify but that is the only way to get everything to communicate back and forth. I would think with Zwave it would clone everything through the 3 controllers. In regards to the Zigbee I heard and someone slip that the zigbee could be on 2 controllers at once but has to be done manually. So using Wink@home I can see alot of the Technical Data, I was hoping I could take that tech data from the zigbee bulbs and manually enter them into Smartthings. 

I would like to make use of the fact I have so many alarm sensors, I have them set to email each sensor's activity to a certain email address. Many are in the Honeywell 5800 series some are the 2gig ones. I did find a thread online where someone could monitor the Honeywells with a Rasberry Pi and report using json (I'm not familiar but ready and willing to learn)

I also want to put my water heater on some type of Z-wave control but not sure the best way to do so.

I wish alarm.com would play nicely with others to make all this more efficient. I have started playing with Home Remote and so forth and i am looking for the ability to have as much as possible on 1-2 screens either by widgets, or some kind of custom layout.

Any questions/comments/Concerns/ Suggestions would be appreciated!!!

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That’s quite a setup! :sunglasses:

Zigbee devices can only have one coordinator under the zigbee profile that both wink and smartthings use, ZHA 1.2. Control4, a very expensive high-end system, uses its own proprietary profile ( not compatible with either wink or smartthings) and it has introduced the concept of secondary coordinators, but that’s very unusual for a zigbee system. So unfortunately with the zigbee devices you’re out of luck-- they have to belong to one system or the other.

The Z wave standard allows for the concept of secondary controllers, but because smartthings is a multiprotocol platform, technically it will join another network, but as you’ve noticed, it does not play well with others. (In fact, you can’t add two SmartThings hubs to one zwave network, either.)

Here’s the official support article:

Note that adding a Hub to a different Z-Wave network will disconnect it from any previously connected Z-Wave devices, and they will have to be put through the exclusion process before being added to the network again. SmartThings strongly discourages adding the Hub to another Z-Wave network. We cannot offer support for disconnected Z-Wave devices or the inability to add devices through the Hub as a result of including the Hub into another Z-Wave network.

It’s not impossible to add another manufacturer’s zwave controller as a secondary to SmartThings, and some community members have done that for specific reasons, but it’s going to be a lot more work than it is with other brands and the results may not be quite what you expect.

So it’s not going to be as simple as it would be if you had, say, two wink hubs or two vera hubs. At the present time, SmartThings works best as a single standalone hub, although you may be able to pass information back-and-forth to other systems. In particular, MQTT is very efficient “man in the middle,” although I just don’t know if there’s any way to use that with wink. And as you mentioned, stringify can also be used in some setups.

Although obviously people have done much more with them, both wink and SmartThings are intended to be plug and play mass-market consumer systems, and you just don’t have the same extensibility options that you might with Vera and homeseer.

What were you hoping to accomplish from a use case standpoint by adding SmartThings to your set up? That might give us a better idea about how you could get everything to communicate effectively.

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As for Z wave control of the hot water heater, as long as you’re just looking for on/off, that one is easy as there are several high load Z wave devices to choose from. I believe most of these will work with wink as they just look like an on/off switch. The ones in the following thread definitely work with SmartThings. :sunglasses:

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People have used many different methods for converting hardwired sensor information to something that can be used by SmartThings. However, some of these relying on hardware, such as the thingshield, which is no longer available.

The following is probably the most popular current method. I don’t know if it meets your needs or not, but it’s worth looking at:

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Awesome information above thank you for all of that! In regards to my interest in bringing the Smartthings into my ecosystem I like how it can support things that aren’t officially supported thanks to the community. I would like to avoid using 5 different apps to access all parts of my infrastructure. I was also interested in the ability for presence detection, in a dream world I was wondering if walking into a certain part of the house at a certain time could trigger x , y , and z. (Walking into my loft after sundown would turn the lights on at 50% tuned to overcast, If I walk into my bedroom after dark it turns on my nightstand light, if it’s my wife it turns on hers)
Check out Xandem.com for a cool new tech regarding this.

I also want to put together some off brand LED strip lighting with an RGBW wifi driver and integrate it into whichever HA system I am using (wanna set this up in a few different places around the house).

Maybe eventually a Tablet dedicated to HA/Security.

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We’ve discussed Xandem in the community previously, including some input from their staff. It’s definitely cool Tech, but it remains to be seen how well it will work in a home environment rather than warehouses. For one thing, I’m pretty sure a dog is going to trigger it. And there are other issues about whether it will interfere with zigbee home automation devices. See the discussion thread:

It’s easy to have lights come on when you walk into a room with an ordinary motion sensor. The issue there is it doesn’t know the difference between you walking into a room and your wife walking into a room. The ability to do that is usually called “microlocation.”

(Xandem doesn’t do that, by the way – – it picks up any motion, not a particular person.)

Eventually most engineers think we will probably get this with a device that tracks heartbeats. But for now if you want to uniquely track two different people in one house, each has to carry a device with them. My personal hope is that eventually this will be able to be a smartwatch in th future, but for now it has to either be an iBeacon or a phone.

Estimote has location beacons which can map a room, but it requires 4 beacons per zone, and that gets pretty expensive.

You can find more discussion of micro location in the project reports on the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki. Just look for the “presence” list. :sunglasses:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section#Quick_Browse_Links_for_Project_Reports.2FQuestions

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Thank you for all of your answers, it is appreciated and very insightful. I will have to dig into those presence detection threads and see what I can do. I would love to get a bunch of Zigbee or Zwave motion detectors but they seem so costly…

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