Post Requests for Zwave Edge Drivers Here (community-created)

[JDRoberts]

@Diegocampy

It seems really strange to me that there are so few of us who are interested in developing these smart apps on the edge.

Edge is not for SmartApps. In a smartthings, context, edge is for things that run on the hub, which means edge drivers that are replacements for the old DTHs and some of the official smartthings features for automations. But no method is provided To allow you to run custom app code on the hub.

So, as others have said, a big part of the issue is that you have to find your own way to host that app code, whether it’s on a local server like a laptop or a raspberry pi or whether it’s at a hosting service like Amazon Web services. And even if you do set that up, it’s not necessarily going to be easy to share with other people.

It can definitely be done, @taustin did it for his MQTT project, but it’s way more work and potentially more cost than the old smartapps, which were hosted for free in the Samsung Groovy cloud.

@Rafael_M also recently created a new endpoint smartapp as a replacement for a now obsolete, groovy smartapp. His GitHub has an excellent discussion of what he had to do to make it all work, and it’s not simple. But it’s a very good example of what can be done.

EP SmartApp replacement for Shabbat-and-Holiday-Modes!

Unfortunately, since groovy is supposed to stop working, my personal favorite smartapp, shabbat-and-holiday-modes (pretty much a must have for any shabbos-keeping smarthome) will stop working. To combat this, I’ve created an open-source replacement! It’s called smartthings-shabbos-mode and it’s on github. It is significantly harder to implement then the old app, but it’s my only option. Setup instructions are on github. Feel free to check it out! As noted in the replies to this thread, the exact instructions are liable to change. As smartthings is going through a transition phase, what works an what doesn’t can be different every day. I’m just trying to get an implementation out for all the people who’d otherwise be left hung to dry by the lack of any replacement for the groovy smartapp.

So there are no “edge smartapps.” There are “endpoint SmartApps” which communicate with the smartthings cloud through the REST API, but you still have to have your own place to host and run the code that decides when to communicate with smartthings, and what messages to send.

Some other platforms, including homeseer and hubitat, do let customers upload app code to that hub. But smartthings does not.

So I think that’s why you are not seeing a lot of people creating new endpoint smartapps right now. There are some, and sharptools is a very good thirdparty example, but most of the device manufacturers just don’t see the point in having to develop for yet another third-party system. They’d rather adopt matter and have one integration method that works with many different platforms.