Officially zigbee has clusters. Z-wave has command sets. SmartThings tries to mush them together into one paradigm, so it says everything has clusters, but it’s still really important to understand that zwave command sets do matter to the performance of individual devices.
finding out what command sets a device supports
The single most important thing to know about any zwave device is what command sets does it require. You can find this out for any certified zwave device by going to the Z wave alliance products official site and looking up its “conformance statement.”
http://www.z-wave.com/find_products/controllers
SmartThings is a zwave controller certified for the “basic” command set. It does not support several of the ZWave command sets, including controller replication.
Consequently, any device which requires those command sets cannot be used as the manufacturer intended with SmartThings.
the “button controller” hack
You may be able to hack it by essentially treating each individual button as a contact sensor but you will only be able to do that if the device reports those button presses to Smartthings. Which not all of them do.
assiciation groups. One works, multiples don’t
When they do report it, it’s almost always through an association group. Then we run into an additional problem which is that the SmartThings hub will only put itself into one association group. However, many recent devices make use of multiple association groups, reserving association group one for one set of functions and association group 2 for a different set of functions, etc.
The minimote works with SmartThings because it uses only one association group and it reports all button presses to the hub in that association group. That’s unusual.
Why do some people report they have GE scene controllers like the 45631 working with SmartThings while other people say it doesn’t work at all?
Scene controllers like the GE 45631 that have limited integration with SmaryThings can be recognized by smartthings as a “thing.” But the scenes have to be set up by a different controller (not SmartThings) which does have support for the scene command sets. When you do it that way, you can have button pushes on the scene controller device control various zwave end devices, typically lightswitches, but SmartThings will be unaware of those status changes. So the people who have it working are usually people who already have the device is working with a different controller, like Vera, before they ever bought SmartThings. Then when they moved it over to smartthings, the scene information was already programmed into the 45631.
However, if you buy the scene control device new and you do not have another controller to use with it, You might not be able to set up control of the end devices.
Also very important if it is this kind of a scene controller, you will not be able to assign the buttons to control zigbee devices or change modes or run routines like you can with the minimote. You will only be able to get local control of other zwave devices.
This is why when you search the forums you see different people reporting different results for the use of zwave scene controllers. Maybe they got it to work by using association. More often they got it to work because it was a device they already owned and they had already set up the scenes in it with their prior primary controller.
What about the zwave.me wall device?
It’s a very cool device. @adamv has created a very nice device handler for it since I first wrote this post, so I’ve updated this section.
