I got a good couple of non smart products capable of receiving commands via serial interface Rs232. I’m controlling them with a button pad right now, but I would love to be able to send the commands via zigbee.
I’m pretty sure it’s possible to create an edge driver that can send commands written in the Smartthings UI, so the driver becomes versatile for multiple serial devices.
I just cant figure out where I find such interface without being in doubt of the products validity and functionality.
Therefor I would like to hear from you, if you have a solution working with this kind of setup.
You would need to use one of the edge services edge drivers to send commands from the hub to something else. You can find the ones that currently exist on the list in the community-created wiki.
Once you have that, you can use a smartthings hub to send commands to a server device on your LAN. So you “just” need a server device that can output serial commands. (Some people use two devices: one to receive the information from smarthings and then have that talk to a simpler device that can just send the serial output. )
Global Cache device. Reliable, powerful, doable, but expensive. Pretty straightforward, though.
One of the big brand names in the space is global cache with their ITACH models.
They have a published API so you can figure out what commands you would need to send.
Roll your own with a raspberry pi with an RS 232 controller. Doable, but a lot more work. If somebody already has a similar project, hopefully they will post it. Again, you will use an edge services driver to communicate to the pi.
use home assistant or duplicate their process with an edge services edge driver.
use the MQTT edge services edge driver to a local server and then out from there.
Here’s one project report from 2018 on the old architecture. You could use the same idea, except instead of using the MQTT bridge, which is Groovy and will no longer work, you would use the MQTT edge services edge driver.
