Thingshield--tell support you want them still offered

Awesome. I’m going to look into this when I have a moment

Nope. Sorry.

Stupid question: Can the SmartThings hub talk to local IP addresses? If not, then I really need a ThingShield.

Otherwise, I can use local REST web services. :slight_smile:

Looks like they are gone for good. :frowning:

Yes, there is a way to replace the ThingShield with an EthernetShield. I am working on modifying my ST_Anything library to do exactly that since ST has abandoned the ThingShield product. This will be especially useful if you’re a fan of the NodeMCU ESP8266-12E based boards. These are about $10, can be programmed via the Arduino IDE, and have built-in WiFi.

I am hoping to have some time over the next week or two to get this working and released to the ST Community.

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Please keep up to date with this project. This sounds really exciting considering I was going to use this shield as a substitute for the $65 osram lightify RGB lights.

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Wow

Just wow. We can almost build these… all parts are still sourceable however…:

The manufacture of the zigbee chip has ceased… some low volume stock can still be found… but the prices tend to be a little stupid

How much was the SmartThings shield selling for again?

The sheer buying power needed to get them that cheap… omfg.

But I digress. I am going to assume since that chip has been binned, that was a major reason for binning the thingshield. So what hopes may have been given by ST CS must either mean they are pulling our legs or redeveloping the thingshield around a new ZigBee device.

When I have more time I will look into what replaced that chip and if there is anything that is compatible in direct replacement. This will take time… I have ft work and ft school…

Again the reason I’d like to avoid this route is to not congest the wifi network with a boat load of wifi devices or making your own mesh with one esp8266 and a bunch of nrfdevices (however they can get some stupid nuts range especially the pa+lna versions)… but the latter makes ST all the more useless, if you wanna go that far into making your own meshes, especially if you can’t extend either your ZigBee or zwave… So Another loss. Another way to do it would be mqtt btw

Just a rant

Bummer.

@ogiewon @Mooseknuckle So there’s no way to replace the discontinued CEL module with a ‘XBee
®
ZigBee’ module with ZigBee turned on or this is heck a lot more complicated than what I can understand at the moment :sweat_smile: lol…

from the link above ‘Configure Series 2 Xbee (S2C) to work with the Zigbee home automation profile and connect to Samsung SmartThings’ credits to @CR76

I’m sure there is a plethora of ways to go about this… And I was considering this (moving to xbee) as an option, I just can’t remember if it satisfies my requirement of meshing with existing zigbee(IE work as a repeater and not just a slave). What I meant by my comment though:
I was hoping to find a direct replacement where you just plug and play. If we do that we can a) build our own boards b) pass the design / new chip to St and see if they would be willing to mass produce again… I have a strong inkling St is just too lazy (where da f*** is my Bluetooth??? Case in point) to push development forward so they may put it on the back burner for so long it gets forgotten.

I am currently working on the Ardunio version of this. Will hopefully be posting an update on this soon.

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@Mooseknuckle - There is another available off the shelf Zigbee chip which ST could simply drop onto the existing ThingShield board. It is simply a newer revision of the processor they currently use, made by the same company. http://cortet.cel.com/products/comparison-chart

It appears that ST has chosen to abandon this portion of the maker community. I don’t believe giving ST a new design will help, as the design they have is fine if they simply used the newer zigbee processor chip revision, and tweaked the firmware accordingly.

The issue with rolling your own, using this newer zigbee chip revision, is that ST has not released the firmware from the original ThingShield. Also, the development tools to program these processors starts at about $1000 per seat, IIRC.

I was under the impression that these can be ordered flashed from the factory so long as you provide the FW… Which I know is not available ATM… Also some of those products are discontinued already so maybe St has lost faith in them.

Also what’s to say they didn’t use (I’m not sure here, just speculating) a standard off the shelf ZigBee (ha,LL,pro whatever) stack and just handle it in software on St side… Seems like it would be more cost effective than making your own FW…

Their Zigbee firmware guy bailed out long time ago and went to Nest. I guess there’s no-one on staff who knows how the darn thing works. :slight_smile:

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Yes, CEL has discontinued certain revisions, but I believe they have always had a new replacement part available, with significant overlap, before stopping the sale of the old part.

Also, the firmware on the ST is pretty unique. It uses Zigbee as a transport for simple ASCII text data. The magic definitely happens in the firmware as it acts as a simple serial communications bridge between the Arduino and the Hub/ST Cloud.

I am trying to replicate this with Ethernet so users would not need to make very many changes to their existing code.

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I have the beginnings of a solution going with a lot more work needed. please check out my video of a basic switch turning on and off an LED using the wireless shield and a series S2C Xbee module.

https://community.smartthings.com/t/things-shield-replacement/66201/6?u=cr76

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Here’s an update on my recent work to deal with the lack of ThingShields. At least you have options!