It’s become pretty clear to me at least that a lot of what I want to do is relatively easy using a duino and all the sketches that I have and that are readily available. Can we get some sort of relatively accurate status on when the shields will be available. I keep thinking “oh, that’s easy on an arduino” but “not worth trying to figure it out” within the ST environment. I get that I inevitably need to master yet another dev environment but with the millions of Arduino’s in dozens of flavor s (including some nice tiny, easy to hide, don’t suck much power, plenty of public domain code) out there, its really a matter of the path if least resistance. There’s also a KS project I’ve backed ghats basically a combo Arduino/ RasPI combo so there’s even more potential, especially for visual display of the iot world under control. Can ST finally put a realistic date on general availability for the shield - I think there would be a surge in usability overnight plus it makes some things jus "so much easier* to implement and lastly, they’re cute. Seriously - what’s he deal?
Ditto… but:
I’ve have some surplus XBee’s and have shields on the way.
Perhaps they won’t interface quite as easily or cheaply as SmartModule Shields; but with XBee on ZigBee HA protocol, I am presuming that the hub won’t care, and writing a Device Handler won’t be much different, since SmartModule is also ZigBee …
Am I right?
I think the benefit of their shield is the easy push button include. Otherwise, a shield is just a shield.
Not really…?
The Thing Shield uses the proprietary Thing Module (which is ZigBee + some SmartThings magic & library).
vs.
an XBee Shield which uses standard XBee modules (which can be restricted to ZigBee protocol… but don’t include the SmartThings magic).
In other words, I don’t quite know what the “magic” difference is, other than what is exposed in the Arduino library for the SmartShield.
I guess the SmartShield library can be refactored to use an XBee Shield?
Pixie dust in the reflow oven.
This Project is making (has made?) some progress on XBee related configuration.
http://build.smartthings.com/projects/xbpro/
…CP.