One Of The Guides I Wish We'd Had

Sidebar: i never understand how or why they choose these names. Was it someone who lost out on a baby name competition?

Which names?

All of them. Zigbee, Z-Wave, OAuth. God knows what they’re smoking.

I suppose you could get creative with multiple hubs and have a hub location be a room, apartment, or separate building, especially if all those devices go back into another 3rd party solution and are combined as a single location.

My story is one of addiction to adding any and all devices I could find because, well, I could and why not? The more I did that, and especially the more zwave devices I added, the worse things got. I also realized I had no good use cases for everything I had, and for the things I wanted, I could no longer go past 300.

When my family really began to adopt and use ST, I scaled back to things that were important, and got rid of stuff just taking up space and batteries.

I’m still close to 300, but now I have room for new things we want, especially motorized blinds with Zigbee.

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Zigbee was named after the zigzag dance of bees communicating with each other.

Zwave was a proprietary lighting system developed by the Zensys company in Denmark.

OAuth was an Open Authorisation protocol.

No odder than “television” or “WiFi” or “refrigerator.” Or “automobile.” Just less familiar. :sunglasses:

My favorite is “Bluetooth,” which Got its name because one of the original developers was reading a historical novel about King Harold Blåtand of Denmark, a Viking who united warring tribes into a single kingdom.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040620150507/http://www.ericsson.com/bluetooth/companyove/history-bl/

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Dude, come on. Seriously. Do you have a 40 bedroom mansion for those 300? Or are your poor family living in a mad scientist’s lab being surveilled all day? hahahah!

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Closer to that.

Open/close sensors on every window, door (some inside ones too), motion sensors everywhere, vents, locks, garage door control, thermos, lux sensors, certain cabinets and secure places. whew… Mailbox, every single switch everywhere, several outlets, and every single lamp. Leak sensors anywhere and everywhere water can leak and cause damage (including down the laundry drain), and humidity sensors in every bathroom and critical area(s). Whole home energy meter and whole home water meter too. I’m sure I’m missing something too.

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To quote a milennial somewhere, i can’t even. You know they say the first step, as i said in the article, is in admitting you have a problem. And no John, that problem is not you don’t have enough devices!

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Oh I don’t hide it, I embrace it…

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You know what’s left? Power. If you’re not already draining most of the grid, you’re definitely going to need a nuclear reactor in your back garden. Do you think it could support Zigbee, or should we go with old-fashioned bluetooth for the uranium fuel rods?

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Crap, forgot about the presence devices (fobs and phones), remotes, main house water valve, sprinklers and controller, and a couple hose timer valves… Did I mention integrating my EyezOn controller for my Honeywell alarm system?

:wink:

My battery consumption and purchases are supporting some Amazon exec’s yacht somewhere in the Med I’m sure, but I am using more recyclables lately.

Once Elon Musk perfects the battery and home storage cells, I’ll go with that vs. dealing with radiation disposal issues :slight_smile:

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Bringing it back to, erm, sanity, temporarily - this is what i quite like about SmartThings, and also why i’ve felt so disappointed by it. There’s potential to really unleash the imagination. It’s like Lego in a way, or an easier Arduino. If you can build a easily-usable development ecosystem, you have a whole new world to play with. Zuck did it with Facebook apps, Arduino did it with hobby electronics - can Samsung do it with this?

Not sure. The original founders of ST had big dreams, but shallow pockets for everything they wanted to do. So here comes Samsung, and yes they’ve helped to move this along. Probably slower and in directions some people don’t like, but it’s moving.

Samsung has to deal with the flexibility ST enables for people like me who like to tinker and develop and still have a stable environment, and for the mainstream consumer who has 10 or less devices and just wants things to plug and play.

The latter is the significant majority for ST I believe. I doubt the latest influx of Lowes Iris users and Wink users shifted that much, but that’s something ST should be able to step up and absorb if their platform and compatibility with devices really existed without custom development, but in reality, it’s almost a requirement right now. I think quickly on boarding Iris/Wink customers that were abandoned is a missed opportunity for SmartThings if you ask me, but I don’t have visibility to what may be going on in the background within ST for things like this. I just see frequent posts about “moving to ST from …”.

I am hopeful that ST will continue to improve things, and still allow development; but I know things do and must change. So far, I’m very happy where I’m at with ST (excluding the new app for now…).

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