I’ve been fairly excited about SmartThings ever since I first saw it, and it’s continued to impress me throughout the development. There’s only been one little snag that’s left me wanting, and that’s lack of offline support for home automation.
Since the SmartThings Hub doesn’t really have any real processing capabilities, most of the thinking is done in the cloud, and this makes the house dumb again should Internet be lost. It also leads to some limitations in smart home features(such as integration with media systems), since everything would need to be in the cloud.
So my major question today is if there’s anyway to redirect the hub to communicate signals to another host, such as a LinuxMCE server? It would be really convenient to be able to use the hub’s multi-sensor array, while enjoying a lot of the powerful customizations possible with other 3rd party home automation systems.
ST hub talks to the cloud over SSL-encrypted socket. You may be able to recover SSL keys by disassembling the firmware, but I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. AFAIK, ST is intends to keep the hub protocol proprietary. Another option would be to completely re-write the hub firmware in ‘open-WRT’ fashion, but then again, there’re other platforms more conductive to creative hacking
I’ve had the same gripe about ST so I decided to add a secondary controller attached to a local Windows server running Incontrol HA Server. That way, I can set my scenes there for crucial stuff like alarm, water shut-off, etc. and use ST for all the other cool stuff it has.
