SmartThings is Dead

General Discussion
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Am I the only one who is stunned that one can no longer buy a ST hub? Sure, you can buy a 2nd gen hub on eBay, but you cannot buy a V3 Aeotec hub ANYWHERE. You can’t and you haven’t been able to for months. Samsung handed hardware manufacturing to Aeotec and it appears Aeotec sh*tcanned the product and stopped making it. If that’s not what they did, one would think they would explain why the product is no longer available and hasn’t been for months. But they haven’t. And I suspect they won’t. And they’ll simply continue to ignore support requests inquiring as to when/if a V3 hub will ever be available again.

Hopefully, someone at either Samsung or Aeotec will find the stones to be straight with their user communities and let us know why the heart of the ecosystem we’ve invested so much time and money into is no more.

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It isn’t available because of global chip supply issues. Same reason you can’t buy new graphics cards or even cars

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I suspect it’s just the same supply chain issues affecting many hubs from many brands right now.

The Aeotec hub has been in and out of stock at Amazon several times over the last few months. As of the time of this posting you could buy it at the following:

But again, it’s been going in and out of stock at a lot of places. As have hubs from Hubitat, Homeseer, EzLo vera, and others.

Again, as of this posting, Homeseer has two of its hubs on back order, EzLo vera has its main hub out of stock, it’s an industry wide issue right now for many things that use complex chips.

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Wyze has been going in and out of stock on multiple items for the last year, with lots of frustration in their forums.

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Even Raspberry Pi’s are hard to find right now.

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So I know it’s really frustrating, but I don’t think this one is a smartthings issue.

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The Aeotec booth at CES this month confirmed it is due to supply issues. They make a great hub, just need the chip supply to be unlocked. You will see many zwave/zigbee items go in and out of stock until it is resolved.

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As others said, it’s a supply chain issue. I just got one delivered January 11th from @TheSmartestHouse, but they went OOS again shortly after mine was delivered.

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And most ZWave and Zigbee coordinate sticks are in/out of stock too.

The main chips for ZWave - the 700 series and 500 series ZWave chips from SiliconLabs are one of the culprits these chips ONLY come from SiliconLabs…

Everyone’s supply on those are backed up.

For Zigbee its mildly better, some chips come from Texas Instruments. But still… Backed up.

So if you camt get the chips REQUIRED for two of the main functions of your hub… You’re delayed making hubs.

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^^THIS, exactly.

Silicone Labs has told at least some manufacturers that 700 series products won’t be available until 2023, and 500 series until Q2 2022. There are other sources for 500 series chips, but the price is significantly higher than purchasing from SL.

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In Europe it’s widely available and it has been since the launch.

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SmartThings is basically dead. But not because of hub shortage, but because of the actions being taken by Samsung. All the pros of this solution have been removed gradually in past years, leaving now but an empty shell.
It’s time to stop mourning and move on.

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:slight_smile: Thanks for contributing. Why frequent a community just to say it sucks? I think it’s great and headed in the right direction with Edge and Matter while keeping the cloud integrations. The hybrid architecture will let it do a lot of great things that Hubitat and Home Assistant won’t be able to do smoothly.

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May I ask, what do you mean by this? I am seriously curious about it.

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Home Assistant will provide Matter support in their Amber hardware.

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As I have waded back into this over the past couple weeks, I gotta say that Smartthings is most definitely NOT dead. With my current arrangement it’s not perfect, but it’s doing most all of what I want it to do. I have the right balance of extemporaneous voice control and programmed automations, and aside from some stuff related to my TV and AVR all is good. And getting those going again is clearly doable.

But to each their own.

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Here is a link to a good writeup on the new application architecture and Rules Engine that is in beta and rolling out soon. Pretty exiting stuff.

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Yeah, it is exciting. But probably 3-4 years late.

Where does Hubitat and Home Assistant unable to do this smoothly?

For SmartThings you currently need all sort of extra pieces and bits just to be able to access LAN devices. Like the LAN Connector, or you need to run your own cloud based SmartApps to access other services. You have a slow and unreliable app called SmartThings. People able to access the cloud API faster with other systems , than the SmartThings app itself. No built in dashboard management, no customisation, etc.
The C2C integrations are embarrassing. Cloud integrations which loose connection to devices, or do not update values but once every 6 hours. So what are you talking about?

SmartThings is part of a mammoth, Samsung, and moves slowly. Meanwhile the competitors are moving and adapting fast with proper documentation and visibility. What does tell you when on a developer conference one of the main subject is the new animated icons…

I would advise read a bit about the competitors on the market to see what they are capable of and how. SmartThings’ main pull force is still the brand name and Samsung’s mass deployment on every sold product.

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Yes, but that is why I was talking about the future direction. If it isn’t for you, enjoy Hubitat. :+1:

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This is one of the main new parts. Imagine hubless SmartThings, since it would be built into everyone’s TV, fridge, etc. That will create a huge user base which will demand a bunch of features and stability. Samsung will have a huge reason to invest.

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Yikes!

I hadn’t seen that before, and I actually found it very depressing. This is still a cloud-based system. (“Hive” is the hub and “Swarm” is the cloud.)

Hive
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The brains of the Rule Engine that contains and is responsible for the majority of the Rule execution code, Hive has two main functions: expose an API to execute Rules and provide an interface for parent services to interact with the platform.
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To reduce overhead, Hive is dedicated to executing Rules, trusting the parent service to provide contextual data needed for rule execution, such as device states or location modes. For example, when a parent service receives a device state change event, it invokes Hive to evaluate (for example, is equals condition true ), and executes the Rule.
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Swarm
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The cloud container for Hive and management of I/O functionality for cloud execution, this service is deployed to the cloud and listens to events from the SmartThings event pipeline. When events are consumed, Swarm invokes Hive to execute Rules. The implementation of Hive’s interface by Swarm is a set of HTTP clients that interact with the SmartThings API.
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For example, when Hive requires a device state to evaluate is equals condition true , Swarm dispatches a GET request to the Device API and forwards the state to Hive. Similarly, when Hive needs to send a device command, Swarm dispatches a POST request to the Device API.

They are claiming this reduces overhead, but it clearly adds it. You don’t need to go to the cloud to get the device state. (HomeKit doesn’t, Homeseer doesn’t, Home Assistant doesn’t, Hubitat doesn’t, Vera doesn’t, matter won’t on most platforms.)

@Automated_House and I were just discussing today in another thread the fact that right now scenes don’t run local even if all the devices in them are eligible to run locally. If I’m reading this link right, scenes may never run locally. Which is tragic.

Maybe I’m misreading it. I honestly hope so. But that is not a description of “edge computing“ in the more general sense as it’s being used today in the home automation industry. Edge computing is supposed to move as much of the processing as possible as close to the user request as possible. That’s not what this design shows.

Right now, HomeKit requires a Meross Smart Plug to be able to run without the Internet and to operate on the local LAN. SmartThings requires the exact same device in the same home to contact its cloud and have that cloud contact the smartthings cloud to update state. No way is that “reducing overhead.“ And again, if I’m reading this right, that’s the way it will continue to operate in the new swarm/hive/drone paradigm. But again, maybe I’m wrong, and I hope I am.

It definitely doesn’t comfort me, though. :thinking:

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Over 90% of the CURRENT SmartThings user base runs without a hub, because it’s a requirement now for every Samsung smart appliance and smart television. They may be demanding stability, but they haven’t gotten it yet, and it’s been two years.

Samsung sold 11 million smart tv’s in one quarter in 2020. They’re all already SmartThings customers, and only a small percentage also have hubs…

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We are working from the same blogs of course, but my read on it is that Hive is the rules engine and can run on BOTH the Drone/Local and Swarm/Cloud. I believe the thing that dictates where the rule run is whether or not they have devices implemented as edge drivers or if they were setup with the cloud schema connector.

See this in their post:

Rule Engine

End-to-End, the process looks something like this:

Rule: If Switch A is ***ON*** , set Switch B to ***ON***

1. User turns *Switch A* on
2. Swarm (cloud) or Drone (hub) receives the ON event
3. Swarm/Drone tells Hive to execute Rules with *if Switch A* is ***ON***
4. Hive evaluates the Rule Conditions and determines to be **true**
5. Hive then evaluates Actions, set Switch B to ***ON***
6. Hive says, “send device command to switch B”
7. Swarm/Drone receives “send device command to switch B” and executes the request

Looking at #2, the ON command can come in through either the cloud or the hub. Cloud could be from another integration or an app. Edge would be from a local device. I think is is based on where the events originate. In #3, Hive runs the rules, but Hive runs in both the cloud and hub. This blog post explains their tech choice since the same code runs in both via a container.

Also check this out:

Drone invokes Hive to execute Rules when events are consumed locally on the Hub

I think I have this correct, but we are both looking through a keyhole until they roll it out.

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