I am approaching the 255 device cap for Z-wave. Can I use another v2 as a secondary controller?
I think it’s time to share some with others…I can certainly help you with a few devices so you can avoid the cap.
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Wow… 255? What else are you trying to add?
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Didn’t even get to window treatments yet
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Sounds like you need more zigbee in your life, it Max’s out at ~65000 devices
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Yeah Zigbee is good. I do it.
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The short answer is probably no. Smartthings account structure doesn’t allow for this even though the Z wave controller itself can act as a secondary controller. You can only have one hub per location.
There are people in the community using both Staples connect and Vera as secondary zwave controllers to smartthings, but you don’t get full functionality.
More importantly, though, if you do run something as a secondary controller you still have the same device cap. Because they all have to belong to the primary’s network and it’s the primary that assigns the network IDs.
Instead, you might need to think about multiple locations with each hub as an independent network. They can’t share smart apps, but you can use different copies of the same smart apps for each “location.”
Or, as others have said, Zigbee.
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Am I correct in thinking that you can’t access devices from multiple locations in one SmartApp? I’m 99% sure the answer is no, but just to cover that 1% of uncertainty…
It would be pretty cool to be able to do this. I can envision a number of situations where this would come in handy…
1.) Having more than 255 z-wave in a house is obviously one.
2.) Having a hub at home and at work… have events at the work hub effect devices at home, such as when an alarm goes off at work it sounds the alarm at a persons home as well.
3.) “poor man’s” life alert… have an elderly parent or family member with a fob that can push it to cause things to happen at your house like lights flashing or an alarm sounding.
@tgauchat would probably know, but I believe the smartapps belong to the location. You can push notifications, I think, to your account for multiple locations which would cover some of your use cases here. But each location has its own copy of the smart app running.
So your account can own multiple locations.
Each location could have only one hub at the current time.
Each smartapp instance belongs to a specific hub. Which obviously makes sense as we move towards local processing. But as I understand it, you could have different instances of the same smartapp running on different hubs and reporting to the same account.
That’s all correct (well… as your full post says, right now SmartApps belong to a Location, but Location & Hub are almost synonymous because of 1:(0,1) constraint – a Location can have zero or 1 Hubs).
Custom SmartApp and Device Type definitions belong to the Account. As side note, these personal (Account level) definitions are not replicated between different SmartThings server shards (i.e., definitions created on graph.api.smartthings.com are not replicated to the UK shard, graph-eu-eu01…).
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