What do I need to do to get ready for Sept 30?

I brought this up earlier, but it was buried in a longer statement.

While I think I can live with 50 drivers, 200 devices is not gonna cut it for me. (I spent the weekend chopping myself down to 200 from 262. I’m gonna want to put those 62 back eventually.)

A few folks on here have suggested multiple hubs because apparently that’s a thing now - but I keep hearing various reports about it from different forums. Is it possible to have two hubs under one account, where smartthings can act on devices on both hubs, including automating across the hubs?

I can understand the limits on drivers because of the memory assist if the hubs, but the devices are stored server side and so 200 feels like an arbitrary limit.

Also @nayelyz earlier in this thread you had mentioned that you were going to check with the developers to see if the 200 limit for devices could be raised. Any word?

Yes, But my understanding is that the 200 device limit applies whether you have any hub at all. It’s at the account level. So adding more hubs doesn’t increase the number of devices you could have, as I understand it. :thinking:

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I have 3 V2 hubs under one account. 2 in one location, 1 in another. Routines work fine across hubs in the same location, but does require the cloud (the hubs won’t try and talk to each other even if they are on the same subnet). Depending on your device load that may work fine for you.

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But my understanding is that the 200 device limit applies whether you have any hub at all. It’s at the account level. So adding more hubs doesn’t increase the number of devices you could have, as I understand it. :thinking:

Ah - well that ups the suckage to an 11. @nayelyz ? Anything we can do here? 200 is WAY too low.

I could make that work, I think

I just ran a test by creating as many virtual devices as I could in a single location.

I now have 206 line item devices in a single location (viewed from the IDE → locations ->devices), that includes edge devices on 2 hubs, cloud, virtual and DTH backed devices. If I try to make more virtual devices, it won’t let me create any more in that location using “Server error has occured.” If I try and add another device in the app using + “Can’t add more than 200 devices”. Why 206? My theory is that I was adding the virtuals in chunks of 10, and it may only check that its sub 200 before it starts creating the devices. So I was able to sneak past the 200 limit just due to timing…

I dont know if I can see all 206 devices in the app, hard to tell as they are all mostly the same virtual device.

I can still create more devices in my 2nd location. The CLI shows all devices in all locations and its over 260.

So my takeaway is:
You can have up to ~200 devices in a single location, regardless of the number of hubs or cloud connectors you have tied to that location.

I’m not sure how many total devices you can have in an account, but its likely the max number of locations * 200.

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Thanks for checking! Do you know If you have hubs in two different locations, can you put devices from them into the same routine? :thinking:

( I believe you can in sharptools, but I don’t know about the regular smartthings app.)

No, routines in the app won’t show devices across locations. They’re not selectable.

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@csstup just to make sure I understand your setup:

  • you have more than one hub
  • you have scattered devices across both hubs
  • you bumped up against the 200 limit (well, 206 given your writeup) on a single hub
  • you have still added an additional 54 devices via the second hub

Is that right?

LOL… it’s SmartThings! Can’t say they have ever known exactly what they were doing, or where they were going. So like always, roll the dice and see what breaks… and whether YOU can fix it 'cause they’ll have no answers (nor will they clearly document it).

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Ignore the hub. Think locations. Cloud and virtual devices aren’t tied to a hub, but to a location.

I have 206 devices (edge/dth tied to hubs, all others tied to the cloud) in Location C. Another 50-60 devices in Location A. I am no longer able to add devices to Location C. I can still add devices in Location A.

Routines in the app do not work across Locations, you can only select devices that are in the current location.

So if you have devices that never need to talk to each other, you could put them in their own location. Or as @JDRoberts said you may be able to use SharpTools or one of the other aggregators to combine devices at a cloud level.

And for further context I do have 2 hubs in Location C. 1 hub in Location A. But that doesn’t appear to matter for total device count. The hub discussion likely only comes up with number of drivers per hub, and routines across hubs in the same location require the cloud.

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OK, that maps to the way I was thinking you were set up.

I get the “think locations” comment - but a location truly does map out to a set of hubs. If ST doesn’t up the limit for devices on a single hub (location) I still have an issue.

In order to do what I want in my home, it’s beginning to be clear to me that I would need to buy a second hub, register it as a second “location” (even though they will be 12 inches away from each other) and then try to bifurcate my devices to keep devices that need to interact with each other on the same hub (or in the same “location.”)

Getting cross locations (cross hub) to work will require something external, like sharptools.io, yonomi, IFTTT, etc.

Is that closer?
Screenshot 2022-09-19 111850

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I see what you’re saying and yes I would agree. There doesn’t appear to be a limit on hub devices (other than the location limit max) but I don’t have a way to test that. I can’t create 200 fake zwave/zigbee/LAN devices on a hub very easily. :slight_smile: Virtual devices (non hub) were the best easy test I could come up with, but maybe someone could create a LAN driver that just creates a bunch of devices that loop back to themselves for testing.

Yep, thats what I’m thinking. Maybe you have zwave/zigbee (hub) devices that work together as a group in one location but set a virtual device that gets shared across locations with one of the external tools. Then actions can happen based on that shared virtual on the 2nd location. Something like that…

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FWIW, Zwave associations can only be between devices on the same hub. Not just the same location. Smartthings doesn’t handle secondary Z wave hubs through the official features. so that’s just something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about separating your devices.

I have heard of some people who use one hub for zwave and another for Zigbee, both in the same “location,” which makes some sense from a network standpoint. :thinking:

Ok, yeah - this all makes sense.

In my past life I’ve built embedded systems that connect to an offsite server or cloud. The driver limit makes sense, especially considering the age of the V2 hub, because it has to fit in memory and stay resident. Devices, on the other hand, do not. They can either be resident on a device, or cache out to a ST server or ST cloud and then get swapped in and out as necessary with little to no loss in performance.

Having talked with folks inside of ST for the past several years, I have come to understand that the 200 limit that was imposed a few years ago was because the mobile apps were having a hard time collecting and caching device state and then rendering the proper icons - so they fixed a limit to 200 (which (a) could easily be gotten around, and (b) they relaxed when they improved the app rendering performance.)

It feels very much like the current 200 device limit is just a carry-over from that original thinking.

If ST and Samsung really, truly want to be adopted en masse by both high-tied and medium-tier consumers, they have to come to grips with the idea that everyone will have 1000s of sensors, actuators, lights, etc - and they must all interact harmoniously.

Even a modest setup for a single room: 2 or 3 windows (so 3 open/close sensors, 3 shades), a vent or 2 (2 smart vents), a temperature/motion sensor (1 device), 4 downlights (4 devices), maybe another switch or 2 (2 devices). Right there that’s 15 devices. That’s just one room.

200 doesn’t make any sense from a mass-adoption point of view.

Sure but then it means that a zigbee device cannot interoperate with a zwave device on another hub without going thru a lot of gymnastics.

If both hubs are in the same location, there’s no “gymnastics“ from the user point of view – – you just use them in the same routines as you always did.

At the present time, the commands will have to go through the cloud, but then they used to for custom code anyway.

So it’s just another option depending on what you’re trying to do. But it won’t increase the number of devices you can have since that limit is by location, not by hub.

It would probably increase the number of edge drivers you can have, though. Because I think that one is by hub. :thinking:

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To clarify there could be some duplication in terminology.

“Secondary zwave controller” isn’t a feature that is officially supported, although it does work. That would be where you are actually joining a secondary zwave controller to the primary at the zwave level. Secondary controllers can join/exclude devices, etc. Its how some of us update firmware on devices by joining a USB Zstick as a secondary controller and updating the firmware on a device still on its existing network. Zigbee doesn’t support the concept of secondary controllers at all.

The other is a 2nd, 3rd, 4th hub itself within a smart things location. As far as Zwave (and zigbee too of course) is concerned they are separate networks each on its own ST hub acting as primary controller for that network. This configuration Smartthings supports with no issues. When you add a new device with Scan Nearby to a location a UI will ask what hub you’d like to do the scan. The caveat is that routines in a location that use devices tied across hubs will never be local.

BTW on my additional hub in a location I get an extra zwave utility option that isn’t there for my main hub in the location.


And in the IDE:

Learn mode would be used when that zwave controller was being used as a secondary controller. In my case it’s not and it’s the primary for it’s own network, but I found it interesting that the option is there.

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:thinking:

I need to chew on this for a bit

Good clarification. I would Add the additional caveat that you can’t use zwave association between devices on two different hubs in the same location when they are set up as separate primaries. That doesn’t affect a lot of people, but it would affect some, particularly those who have a handheld controller like a Fibaro keyfob where they are using association. Again, I know it doesn’t affect very many people, but we have had a couple of community members tripped up by it.

Oh, and one other very small point:

Zigbee doesn’t support the concept of secondary controllers at all.

You actually can do this with Zigbee, for example, control4 does. But you can’t do it with the Zigbee profiles that smartthings supports.

There are four (4) main deployment scenarios for a Control4 ZigBee Pro mesh:
.

  1. Single controller running ZServer and ZAP
  2. Single ZServer and multiple ZAPs
  3. Multiple ZServers with one ZAP associated with each ZServer
  4. Multiple ZServers with multiple ZAPs associated with each ZServer
    Deciding on which scenario to use depends on a number of factors: size of the home or office, materials of the walls, and so on.

———————-
That’s all part of a manufacturer-proprietary profile, though. But it does still count as “Zigbee.”

I know, unimportant to 99.99% of readers. It’s an engineer thing. :wink:

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