[RELEASE] Homebridge SmartThings v2.0

I’ve just installed the iklein99 version of the smart things plugin and it is fantastic, it’s being updated very regularly and I’d very much recommend people having a look at this one.

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good to know. i just did a search for plugins yesterday and found it and it looked promising. i liked how active the dev is too. i installed it but havent set it up just yet. will probably wait to see what ends up migrating on the ST side first

And will this work with the new groovy-less SmartThings?

yes. it requires you to set up a Personal Access Token

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Yep, this just uses a token, so I believe it will

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Further to this, I subscribed to the GitHub notifications and already there have been further commits, one user raised a request around contact sensors, and boom, next day there’s a commit for the same.

Very active dev, deserves support

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Pardon my stupidity: how could I set this up in Hoobs?

You would probably need to contact the developer and see if they can produce a plugin for hoobs

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Yes, I found it. Plug-in slightly older than GitHub version. Asked developer how often they are “aligned”

Thank you!

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Just putting this out there that if you had Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi or whatever else and worried about losing it after the groovy IDE deprecation you could always install Home Assistant on that same device and add the SmartThings and HomeKit integrations and it’ll accomplish the same thing plus lots more as it could act as an easy replacement for webCoRE too. Works great.

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Do you have a link for the idiots guide on how to do this?

I’m not sure there will ever be an idiot’s guide to Home Assistant - while in the long run it’s easier to use than SmartThings, there is a learning curve. That said, once you have it set up, the HomeKit integration is much snappier that the (deprecated) ST-Homebridge integration. The Home Assistant-ST integration works very well too. I’ve moved everything except a couple of Zigbee bulbs from ST to HA, and everything still looks perfectly integrated. If you go this route, I recommend that you install the ST integration upfront, and then you can migrate devices at your own pace. Some useful links:

Finally, if you go this route, check in to the Former smartThings Users thread in the Home Assistant Community. You’ll see some familiar names - hope we see you there.

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Excellent post!

One point that people do need to be aware of, regardless of the platform they might be moving to, is that if you move only a few Zigbee or zwave devices at a time the new network may be quite fragile compared to the old one, just because there are fewer devices. There may be fewer paths for messages to route through, or repeaters missing in critical spots.

I have quite often seen people complaining that a new platform does not perform as well as the old one when they are moving just a few devices at a time, not realizing that they can’t fully compare the two until both have a robust mesh.

(You might also damage the old mesh, of course, by removing a critical repeater, but I have found that people usually realize they did that when it happens. what they don’t realize is how their old network grew over time. )

It’s important to remember also that these are both 360° networks. The battery remote in your living room might be relying on a repeater in the bedroom on the floor above, while the bedroom table lamp is routing through a wall switch one floor down and one room over.

Mesh networks are generally highly efficient in finding the best routes, but they choose routes that a human might not. And when you start pulling devices out, things can get complicated.

You definitely can move devices a few at a time. It’s just helpful to keep this issue in mind when you do so. :sunglasses:

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That’s what I’ve been doing, moving over a one or two at time, and so with that do you recommend to just take the plunge and do it all at once?

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There’s a great Facebook group if you search for Home Assistant that can help you out as well as really well put together YouTube video guides.

Start by taking your Raspberry Pi or whatever and decide if you want to run Home Assistant OS or if you’re doing other things (especially if you’ve got a computer where you may not want to dedicate the device to one thing although you could always run a virtual machine too) or do what I’m doing running Home Assistant in a Docker container. Here’s the guide now to install.

Then it’ll take you through the setup. Afterwards add the SmartThings integration to bring in your SmartThings devices over to Home Assistant and then add HomeKit.

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No, as I said, it’s fine to just move a few at a time if you want. Just take mesh strength into account when you decide what to move next. It’s no different than buying a brand new device and adding it to your new Network. Do you have repeaters in place to reach it if needed? :thinking:

The issue I have seen is, for example, someone who decided to change over everything in their home office first but putting the new hub fairly close to where the old one was. They had insufficient repeaters to reach from the new hub to the back office, so everything on the new platform was slow and unreliable. But that wasn’t because of the new platform. It was because the old platform had a lot more repeaters along the way to reach that room.

Once we identified that issue and they added a couple of inexpensive new smart plugs to create a backbone route to that office it turned out the new platform was in fact quicker and more reliable than the old one had been. It just didn’t have enough devices when they first evaluated it.

They hadn’t been able to move enough repeaters from the old platform initially because they still needed those to keep the old platform working into other rooms.

I saw the identical issue with a different person who decided the first thing they would try on the new platform was a detached greenhouse. Exact same issue: they thought the new platform was terrible, but the reason was they hadn’t included enough repeaters to get signal out that far.

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Yes. Pull the bandaid, Cut and move Gene.

There will be a point where your existing mesh will collapse if your pulling repeaters and moving them

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Hubitat has native integration now with HomeKit. Need Smarthings to get the same ability.

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At this point, SmartThings is the one of the few ecosystems that lacks native HomeKit integration. Home Assistant has both inbound and outbound integration; Hubitat as noted elsewhere; vendor-specific includes Hue, Velux, Sonos, Hunter-Douglas, WeMo … the list goes on. Oh yeah, let’s not forget HomeBridge.

ST is definitely a laggard, and the decision not to make Matter devices available to other controllers means this won’t get better soon.

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nope, it’s a company policy and a conscious choice.

There is not much sense for Samsung to make Apple devices more capable and more competitive.
Especially when the price of the hub is low and there are no recurring payments.

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