I recently got my Smartthings Hub, and one thing that I didn’t realize was that Z-Wave works in different bands in different countries. (I had been using mainly Wi-Fi devices, and didn’t learn much about Z-Wave before buying it.) I live in Australia and I would like to try to stay on the legal side and use Australian Z-Wave things, (at least for now, since I also bought some Australian Z-Wave devices!) and was wondering if it is possible to plug an Aeotec Z-Wave dongle into the hub and let the hub to control it somehow?
Unfortunately, no. First, at present the USB dongles on the back of the hub don’t work at all, for anything. And second, you can’t add a secondary controller of a different zwave frequency. So your SmartThings account wouldn’t recognize it anyway.
Your SmartThings hub can only work with Z wave devices of the exact same frequency as the hub.
If you got an aeotec Z wave stick on the Australian frequency, you can stick it into a laptop and use it with the indigo Z wave controller software with your Australian Z wave devices, but you won’t have any integration with SmartThings. And it doesn’t work with any zigbee devices, but it’s a good solution for Z wave.
Homeseer and Zipato both make Z wave control modules on the Australian frequency, but both are significantly more expensive and technically more complex to operate than SmartThings or Indigo.
I was actually trying to get ST working with Home Assistant and have ST control the Z-Wave devices hooked up to HASS for the past few days before posting this. But I couldn’t even get HASS working reliably in the first place! It won’t start after reboots and I have reinstalled Hassbian/Raspbian for a couple of times without improvements.
I use Google Home extensively, which is another problem that limits my options. I was looking at Homeseer, but the price is kind of putting me off as well.
And second, you can’t add a secondary controller of a different zwave frequency. So your SmartThings account wouldn’t recognize it anyway.