Yea I’m bashing ZigBee a little but they see their short comings and are addressing some of the major ones. I’m a long way from jumping ship and when I do my money is still on Thread. Z-Wave doesn’t even enter my mind as a long term player so I’m okay if they are smiling right now.
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So, just to double check and confirm, ST hub is Thread/Weave compatible, correct?
Not yet. It is “thread-capable” but the capability is not turned on yet. Meaning they wouldn’t have to make any hardware changes to make it thread compatible, but they would probably have to make firmware and software changes.
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JD did SmartThings admit to this officially? You know Thread is not a simple change to a ZigBee radio it is basically a burn down and rebuild of the radio’s firmware. At the transport layer about the only thing Thread has in common with ZigBee is they are both based on the 802.15.4 spec. In order for SmartThings to say something like this they either have another Thread radio in the hub they are going to turn on or they are planning on reprogramming their current ZigBee radio to make it a Thread radio. If they do that then how are they still going to support ZigBee?
I may be wrong I’m not a member of the Thread group so absolutely could be missing something. But I’m not aware of a single 802.15.4 radio that supports both Thread and ZigBee transport on one SOC. Yes Thread has announced the support for ZigBee clusters but that is up at the application level. So your app can send cluster commands like it does today but they ride on top of the Thread transport.
I’m not saying SmartThings cant do this I just want to understand how they will do it with Hub V2. Maybe they are going to add a Thread radio to one of the USB ports??
Based on the most recent zigbee/thread technical publications from the zigbee alliance, zigbee devices which are operating on an active Zigbee network will be able to also carry thread messages.
How/where/when/why is still in development. It definitely won’t be before zigbee 3.0. But thread really wants those low-power sensors, understandably, and zigbee doesn’t want to be left out.
I don’t think it’s going to be part of the 3.0 release. It may be something like 3.4. And it may require Coordinator activity. So no idea what the timeline is going to be.
To be honest, the thread stuff is still so fluid i’m not paying that much attention to the details. I’m always more interested in implementation than theory. So I’ve been mostly following it from the Zigbee 3.0 side. When thread is actually implemented with some real devices I’ll take a closer look. 
(I can’t publish the stuff I have, A friend in one of the working groups sent it to me, but i’ll ask if there something open we can link to.)
As for a Samsung statement, yeah there’s one somewhere and that one was public. I remember what it looked like but I don’t remember where it was. I’ll see if I can find that too.
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Found it. Multiple statements from both Alex and Samsung personnel at the trade shows that the V2 hub would support thread.
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/06/smartthings-next-generation-hub-will-support-thread-and-the-oic/
Samsung people have been saying the same things in thread group meetings, including since V2 release.
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Humm this is going to get interesting. The article from GiGAOM you posted sure enough does say right there in the title SmartThings Hub V2 will support Thread. But when they elaborate about their conversation with Alex he says they are “going to support it”, I didn’t read that it would be supported in V2 along with ZigBee. You would think they would correct it if their not. This article also says the hub would be released in April 
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Yea I believe that but I’m not sure these “Samsung people” are the same as the SmartThings people.
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The gadget media industry is utterly uninterested in accuracy. They spend as little time as possible “creating” content by essentially reprinting press releases.
Just look at what they write about every shiny new thing that shows up on Kickstarter and IndieGogo or pre-sales… Exhibit A:
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LOL, That is just crazy. They got 3M in venture capital!! My god people just through money away.
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What’s amazing to me is the number of people who think the term “proprietary technology” has any meaning at all when there’s no patent associated with it.
As most people who read these forums know, I don’t consider any device real until you can order it from Amazon for two day delivery. Up until then anything you read is marketing.
But there are some previous steps. One of them is a patent application if it is in fact “proprietary technology.” Another is submission for certification if it is in fact a “production prototype.”
The Harmony hub extender, for example, was Zwave-certified about three months before it was released for sale. It still wasn’t quite “real” at that point, but at least it was possible. Something real was happening.
Hardware is hard. Certified hardware is even harder. Certified hardware with radio frequency communication is really hard. Regardless of the protocol being used.
I do occasionally back kickstarter or indiegogo projects when I think it’s important to show market support for a particular form factor and when I think there’s solid engineering behind it.
But the last two products I backed were available both sooner and cheaper direct from Amazon than I got in my backer package. To me, that says a couple of things. One being that these were good products. And the second being that the market rewards good products.
I’m not unhappy about having backed them, because again, I was doing that as a market demand statement. But I never back something just because I think I’m going to get it sooner or cheaper because these days that’s not necessarily true.
And I Generally run away from something who says they have “proprietary technology” but no patents to back it up.
Just sayin’…
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