By the way, I’m seeing a lot of confusion about the Zigbee profiles, so let’s clear that up to avoid any additional future confusion.
Originally back in 2014 the SmartThings hub supported one of many different Zigbee profiles: ZHA 1.2, the Zigbee Home Automation profile.
ZLL, or Zigbee Light Link, was just coming into use and was only intended for smart bulbs being used in a set up which didn’t have a hub. under the specification, every ZLL device had to also be able to fall back to the ZHA profile if connected to a ZHA hub. So there was never an issue of smartthings “not supporting ZLL”— it didn’t have to.
Separately from that, the integration between a hue bridge and a smartthings hub has never been a Zigbee connection, and still isn’t. it’s over the local LAN, or it’s cloud to cloud. The hue bridge creates its own little Zigbee Network for the devices connected to it. The smartthings/Aeotec hub creates its own Zigbee network. So they aren’t using Zigbee to talk directly to each other anyway.
One of the other existing zigbee profiles was the “green power“ profile, which was used for batteryfree devices. It was mostly popular in Europe. The Philips hue bridge included the green power Zigbee stack, which they used for their own 1st generation tap button. Smartthings did not include the green power profile.
The next thing that happened was that the Zigbee alliance came out with a new profile, which was intended to unify some of the existing profiles. That included ZHA, ZLL, and the green power profile, but it was left optional for whether certified Zigbee hubs included the green power command support, or not, and most of them didn’t.
Most smartthings hubs were updated to Zigbee 3.0 about two years ago as was the second generation Philips hue bridge. They still don’t use Zigbee to talk to each other, though.
ZLL and ZHA were both dropped as independent profiles.
So…if the light switches that you bought are current models, they are very likely to be Zigbee 3.0, not ZLL. But if they use the optional green power stack, they will work with the hue bridge, but not directly with the smartthings hub.
THE OFFICIAL INTEGRATION
OK, so that’s all the different Zigbee issues. The smartthings hubs are now Zigbee 3.0 certified and they can handle all the regular ZLL devices, no problem. But they don’t support direct connection with green power devices.
And the ST/Hue integration isn’t using Zigbee anyway, but it doesn’t show the greenpower devices either. that’s because of an entirely separate issue: what was included in the integration that was written by the smartthings staff working with the Philips hue staff.
And for reasons unknown, that project decided not to send messages about the greenpower devices from the hue bridge integration. They Certainly could have, but didn’t.
Just last month, the greenpower devices showed up in the Alexa/Hue integration as available triggers for an Alexa routine. I’m guessing that had to do with work being done for matter, but in any case, it was nice to see.
Meanwhile, the developer for the custom edge driver has been working on getting information for devices linked to a hue hub into smartthings through that custom edge driver. The switches have taken longer than the motion sensor, but he has that in alpha testing now. So I do expect that to happen pretty soon.
I hope that helps clear up some of the confusion and the terminology. If you could give us the model number of the devices that you bought, I can tell you whether they are in fact, green power devices or not.
