Use Cooper RFWC5 as a multi button switch?

Absolutely not possible if you’re planning to use the native scene controller capabilities of the Cooper device, because those are zwave commands and they will only work with other Z wave devices that are within one hop of the Cooper device.

Hue bulbs are zigbee, the Hue bridge is using LAN, neither can accept a zwave command of any type.

If someone has set up the Cooper device to act as what SmartThings calls a “button controller” which means that every press of a button on the Cooper device sends a message to the smartthings hub, then you can use it just like any other button controller such as a minimote or a SmartenIT 3 toggle or an enerwave SC7. So you press the button on the device, it sends a message to the hub, and you have a smartapp which then sends a message to whatever your end device is.

One of the biggest strengths that SmartThings has is that it is a multiprotocol platform. That’s what let you mix-and-match a Z wave switch with a zigbee lightbulb. But all of that work takes place in smart things, not in the switch.

Zwave Scene Controllers Bypass the Hub–so they only work with other Zwave Devices

Zwave devices which are “scene controllers” have the ability to send zwave command directly to another Z wave device without talking to the hub. But if they don’t talk to the hub, then they have no way at all to talk to non-Z wave devices. And because they don’t talk to the hub, the statuses never get updated in SmartThings.

The Alternative is using the hub as a middleman, which is what button controllers do

The Enerwave SC7 is a very popular multibutton device which works well as a wallmount button controller.

https://www.amazon.com/Enerwave-ZWN-SC7-Controller-7-Button-REQUIRED/dp/B00RY4LP5Y

The problem with the Cooper is that it’s designed to use scene control. That is to talk directly to another Z wave device, not to talk to the hub and use it to pass messages.

It also supports Association, so it may be possible to build a device handler for it that will make it function as a smartThings “button controller” but the fact that no one has done it yet indicates that there may be a barrier. it’s an old device that has been around longer than SmartThings, so I’m sure people have tried.

If you want to mix protocols, you need to go through the hub

But the main point of this post is to underscore that if you want a Z wave device to trigger events on a zigbee device or vice a versa, you have to go through the smartthings hub. And any Z wave device which is using the “scene control” command sets is not designed to go through the hub for those commands.

Creating the Scenes in the First Plaxe

We should also note that many Z wave scene controllers assume that the primary controller will set up the scenes and just pass them the scene numbers. Smartthings doesn’t do this. So you will occasionally read forum posts where people have used a non-smartthings primary controller to create the scenes initially, loaded them into a scene controller, and then added that soon controller to SmartThings. It’s ugly, but it can work as long as the only device is included in the scenes are Z wave devices. As soon as you want to mix protocols you cannot use the native Z wave scene control commands.

This is also why you’ll see posts were people say that a scene controller worked fine for a while and then something happened and it stopped working and they couldn’t get it to work again. In most of those cases you’ll see that they Artie had the scene controller working with a non-smart things controller, like Vera. Then they moved it over to smart things and it worked because the scenes had been pre-loaded by the previous controller. But the first time they reset anything, they lost the scenes, and since SmartThings doesn’t create zwave scenes they were stuck.

So if you do you want to use a Z wave scene controller just to control some other zwave devices, you don’t care that the statuses never get updated in SmartThings, and you never want to mix in any devices of other protocols, you’ll still likely need another device to create the scenes.

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