Hi there! I’m new to SmartThings. Recently I purchased a 65" Samsung “The Frame”, and I discovered that it can act as a SmartThings hub. Apparently I can purchase a Samsung USB SmartThings Hub Dongle for the TV that adds Zigbee comms to the TV’s ST hub. However, I have a LOT of Z-wave devices that I currently control with HomeSeer… and zero Zigbee devices. I’d like to try moving some of these Z-wave devices to SmartThings, but I don’t know if there’s any way to add Z-wave to the TV’s ST hub. Does anyone know a way to do this? For example, can I plug any USB Z-wave adapter into my Samsung Frame TV, and will the Frame’s ST hub then recognize that USB Z-wave adapter and use it like it would the USB Zigbee dongle?
Unfortunately not possible at the time of this writing.
Smartthings used to make a dongle for the TV that included both zigbee and Z wave, but it was only available briefly and it was discontinued a couple of years ago. And it won’t work with any third-party zwave controller.
So if you want to bring everything into the smartthings app, the only way at present is to get the Aeotec “works as a smartthings hub“ hub and use that for your Z wave devices.
https://aeotec.com/products/aeotec-smartthings-hub/
What country are you in? They are some supply chain issues right now and it may be out of stock at a lot of the usual retailers.
Thank you for the info! I’m in the US, and that Aeotec hub is out of stock on Amazon. I wonder if it’s possible to track down the Zigbee/Z-wave dongle that was discontinued. It’s a real bummer that Samsung isn’t including Z-wave, as there are still a lot of devices that use it, methinks.
Unfortunately, I believe that, even if you found the hardware, you would not be able to set it up and use it as it will not be able to be added to your account. I know the similar Nvidia dongle was discontinued and stopped working.
See the following current discussion thread for US retailers that do have the Aeotec hub in stock as of the date of this posting:
SmartThings, Hubs, Philips Hue Scenes, Action Tiles and Setup - Help Please - #24 by JDRoberts
After looking at the aeotec hub, i now see that it only has a zwave 500 series controller. im now wondering whether theyre going to release an updated SmartThings hub that has zwave 800 series controller. Have you heard anything about this?
Yeah, they haven’t updated the zwave radio since 2018, so they’re starting to fall behind…nothing announced regarding timelines. Since 2018, Aeotec acquired Popp which has a 700 series in a different model line, but that doesn’t work with SmartThings. And Samsung released the SmartThings station last year, which has Zigbee, Thread and Matter support, but no zwave. So it’s hard to figure the trajectory.
Hubitat, Homey, Homeseer, Fibaro, Ezlo Vera, Homeseer, and the new Zooz Zbox all have 700 series hubs out. But SmartThings has been so busy with its own major architecture change and supporting matter that I don’t think they’ve given much thought to zwave. It’s always been a limited implementation when compared to the zwave first competitors.
I’ve got a topic in the forum on some of the missing pieces if you’re interested:
Nice! Thank you for the info!!
One of the things I’ve loved about HomeSeer has been its customizability… you can add almost whatever interfaces you need (Z-wave, Zigbee, etc.), and you can be as fine-tuned with device routines as you’re able to program; the downside is that HomeSeer’s end-user interface (e.g. phone app) is rather basic and unfriendly. SmartThings has a great end-user interface with Galaxy phones and other devices (from what I’ve seen thus far), and I’m super excited about the possibility of syncing Philips Hue with Samsung’s TV using Philips Ambilight app, but I’m dumbfounded that Samsung has limited the ability to add interfaces like Z-wave to its SmartThings hubs. Most of my smart home devices are Z-wave that currently on a HomeSeer hub. I can use a HomeSeer app to expose SmartThings devices to HomeSeer; but HomeSeer & SmartThings don’t have any apps/plugins to expose HomeSeer devices to SmartThings, LOL. This just all seems so silly and confusing. I already have a HomeSeer hub w/ Zwave, SmartThings TV hub w/ Zigbee, Philips hub for Hue lights… I don’t want to have a second SmartThings hub just to make a way for SmartThings & HomeSeer to share Z-wave devices.
Point 11 in the zwave gaps topic:
- add and manage secondary zwave hubs through the official UI.
Smartthings has never provided official tools for managing,p secondary hubs, whether incoming, or outgoing. You can’t even put two smartthings hubs together on a Z wave network.
This is because of the proprietary smartthings architecture, which lies over the top of the independent third-party standards like Z wave and Zigbee. While you might think that would make it easier, it doesn’t, because they can no longer easily use the official third-party standard utilities for this type of thing.
They made the decision fairly early on that they didn’t want their customers to have to know what protocol any one device was, and therefore they only do things that can be done across protocols
That does make for a nice app, as you noted, since everything looks the same and appears to work the same. But you do lose some functionality from each protocol. And multiple Z wave hubs is one of that category.
You can’t even put two smartthings hubs together on a Z wave network.
Interesting. This makes it even MORE frustrating that I can’t add Z-wave to my Samsung TV’s SmartThings hub, because even though I already have a functional hub, I’d have to buy a whole other SmartThings hub (instead of just a Z-wave add-on), set up that device (which will use up more electricity, more physical space, and an extra electrical outlet), and disable my TV’s hub. Clearly SmartThings can handle Z-wave, because Aeotec has a SmartThings hub with Z-wave. Why won’t Samsung provide a way to add this to my current hub? LOL
As a side note, now that I think about it, I’m not sure whether the SmartThings plugin for HomeSeer allows HomeSeer to locally control SmartThings devices (i.e., without going through the cloud).
You don’t add a new hub to your current hub. you add both to your smartthings account. That works fine. Lots of people have more than one hub on their accounts.
Remember that the smartthings app doesn’t talk to your hub directly: it talks to the smartthings cloud (you must have an active Internet connection to use the smartthings app, even if it’s on the same Wi-Fi as your hub.)
So your television hub can talk to the smartthings cloud, your Aeotec hub can talk to the smartthings cloud, your smartthings station can talk to the smartthings cloud, and all the devices from all the hubs show up in the one smartthings app under your same account.
And as long as they’re all in the same smartthings “Location“ you can even create routines using devices that belong to different hubs. It’s just that those routines will have to run in the smartthings cloud rather than on any one hub.
So there’s no reason to disable anything if you have more than one hub. They aren’t communicating with each other at the network protocol level, but that doesn’t matter. Each hub is communicating with your account in the cloud.
For those with a lot of technical skill, it’s even possible to communicate with another hub using MQTT or smartthings and a rest API and a bunch of proxy virtual devices. But it’s not a local connection. It’s cloud to cloud.
Hmmm… So, with so much of this functionality taking place in the ST Cloud, what is the purpose of the edge drivers? How much activity has actually been moved locally? One of the big reasons I chose HomeSeer a few years ago was because it’s run entirely locally. I’m curious exactly what I’m able to do locally w/ SmartThings now that edge drivers are being used.
If all of the devices in a routine are directly connected to the same hub via Z wave, or Zigbee, or thread, then, most of the routines that you create in the smartthings app can run locally on that hub. That’s a big change compared to previous versions of the architecture. But the architecture does still expect that the hub will check in with the cloud at least once a day and things can start to go funny if it doesn’t. And anything that you do with the app still requires the cloud. So you can’t open the app and tap on the device tile and turn the device on without an active Internet connection. But if you have set it up so that physical manipulation of one device sends a message to another device, that will still work in most cases, even without the hub being connected to the Internet. For a while, anyway. Same with timers.
@h0ckeysk8er has been keeping a list of what features in a routine will require the cloud.
So more stuff is local than we used to have, but it’s still mostly a cloudbased system. They didn’t have to design it that way, but they did.
The stated official purpose of the shift to edge drivers was to reduce latency and increase reliability. It’s not clear if that’s happened yet, though.