I have a significant investment in RAKO lighting for our rear extension.
The whole system is entirely wireless and can be managed via push button wall plates, a Rako remote or an iPhone application.
I’ve just installed Rule Machine and I’m giddy with excitement about the possibilities.
The question is has anyone else had a go at integrating RAKO lighting with SmartThings yet?
Jim
Looks like Rako uses its own protocol (not Zwave or Zigbee, which are the two native SmartThings protocols), but does provide several integration options to third party systems. Unfortunately SmartThings also does not support UDP, which limits things somewhat.
It looks like the easiest integration would be via IR, when you could use global cache or Harmony.
http://www.rakocontrols.com/experience/control/
@pstuart knows a lot about integrations, he might be able to say more.
Am I correct in assuming that you’re in the UK?
Yes I’m in the UK.
shame about the UDP angle, I’m wondering if perhaps I could do something with HTTP and or introduce an Arduino for serial connection. I’m desperately trying to work all this IoT stuff with as few boxes as possible.
The collection of hubs scattered around the house is bewildering at the moment.
If I can start to pull out boxes and use a single instance then this whole thing starts to become a far more practical proposition for the world at large.
I’ll have a play and see what the art of the possible is.
Jim
Hi Wondering how you were getting on with this? I have just got a Smart hub and also have Rako and I am looking in to making them work together. On a side note I have heard that Rako might be bring out a new hardware bridge that would work with Smart Hub.
ST does support TCP though, and if you have a Rako Bridge, you can control it using raw TCP. I’ve done it in Python, but really not sure where to start using Groovy!
Sounds good. Any more details?
I’ve been working on my own software bridge that talks to a RA-Bridge via UDP and to the outside world via a REST API. I’ve written a basic PoC in C#.NET at the moment, but it’s enough to demonstrate two-way comms between SmartThings and Rako. 
There’s a lot more work to do though, and I may re-write it in Node.js, but the principle is sound. As soon as I have something worth sharing, I will.
SmartThings does not officially support TCP communications, and consequently while you can format TCP commands to send out, the hub will not process the incoming responses. So it may work with some devices, but not all.
(You probably already know this, but if you just search the forums for “TCP” you will see a lot of references that mean the specific brand “TCP lighting” not the TCP communication protocol. Somewhat ironically , the official integration with TCP lighting is cloud to cloud, not LAN. So when you see comments like “TCP works” in the devices section of the forums, it’s usually a reference to that particular lighting brand. To discuss the communication protocol, try the developers section instead.)
Yes, I noticed that about the TCP lighting. Very confusing! Will try developer’s section.
How would I use this in the IDE to control my rako? Im tech literate but cant programme for toffee!
Thanks 
Stuart