SmartThings support for Local control

Has any of the Red series switches been fully approved by SmartThings so it can be operated local versus remote. Specifically being able to operate without Internet if it ever did go out and for speed of response.

I thought I saw a post by @Eric_Inovelli saying SmartThings certification was close?

Hey @atchinson - excellent question!

Not yet - but let me follow up to see where they’re at. Our ilumin bulbs were finished before for some reason.

However, the disappointing news is that ST is not going to make our entire switch run local as it’s too complex. In other words, they will certify it as a basic Z-Wave switch, but not with all the capabilities it has in it.

The reasoning I received is that their goal is to cater towards the mass market user instead of the enthusiast. They do not want to overwhelm n00bs with all the bells and whistles, but rather keep it simple and then for us enthusiasts, we can install a handler. However, as you know, any handler runs via the cloud.

I don’t agree with this logic at all, but there’s obviously not much we can do :confused:

Hopefully if there’s enough pressure (hint, hint) you all can blow up their forums and make it happen!

Wish I had better news here.

Come over to Hubitat, it’s all local control here.:wink:

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Eric, do you happen to know where we could make a post or complaint to be the most effective? Would love to press them on this :slight_smile:

I don’t without giving out specific names, but maybe if you create a topic in the ST forum and gather the troops, I could send that post onto their engineers. I know for a fact that a few of them monitor the forums as well!

To be clear, very little on SmartThings is actually local even when devices are “local.” Since manual control always requires the cloud, it’s really the SmartApp that matters, and there it’s only Smart Lighting and Smart Home Monitor, both under the right conditions. (You are quite likely already aware of this—just making it clear for anyone who reads this and isn’t.) Obviously this switch would be nice for Smart Lighting in that case, but it would probably be tough to manipulate the LED bar in meaningful ways with just that app, so you’re likely outside of local territory just there already—but you’ll be back in it with the stock Z-Wave switch driver, just without these features.

If “local” is important to you, you’re probably on the wrong platform. I know the poster above sounded like they were joking about Hubitat, but it’s true–you could get entirely local execution there. And you could tie the switch into SmartThings using HubConnect if you still needed to do something in ST. :slight_smile:

Eric, was the not approved for local for the current ST local processing or are they referring to when they expand it as announced at the developers conference this week?

I understand that ST is soon to get a lot more local processing and wondering if your answer was related to the current or expanded local processing we will soon see.

It was for current ST local processing. I’d love for some good news to come out of the Developers Conference!

Have you kept up with it at all this week? Sounds like they are really planning to move to local processing but there has been no eta which is a little upsetting. They are also going to move to a new rules engine which webcore will also leverage in the future. From what i can tell, it will be local, but wont include every feature that is currently in webcore from the start. Most noteably this will be missing expressions and variables which kinda stinks - but we have to start somewhere!

I’ve seen a lot of jobs posted for the SmartThings office in town. Seems like they recently got more funding at least.

What is everyone’s opinion on Hubitat then?

@Eric_Inovelli does Hubitat fully support Inovelli devices with local control? Have you looked at, tested, planning to move from SmartThings to Hubitat? Is Hubitat making SmartThings (Samsung) move to local control?

@atchinson - I’ve been running Hubitat since about mid-September. I’m not going back to SmartThings. It’s not as “easy” to setup rules and doesn’t support Ring like ST does, but I can get by without those things. Notifications work for me (granted, I’m not using them as much until the Dimmers make it to my house). I would highly recommend HE as a local platform. They may have a great Black Friday deal coming too…

I’ve been running Hubitat since shortly after they launched (January of 2018) and couldn’t be happier. Anything Z-Wave and Zigbee is entirely local, as is really any automation that doesn’t inherently depend on the cloud (like Alexa voice control). I have a few Red Series switches working with 100% functionality on a friend’s Hubitat and should have some dimmers for myself soon. :slight_smile:

Hubitat is, of course, a newer and lesser-known player. It excels at Z-Wave and Zigbee (and documented LAN devices). SmartThings does, however, seem to have an edge with cloud partners like Ring (not officially supported on Hubitat, but IFTTT or an Alexa Routine can provide workarounds). My preference is for local devices anyway, so I have no desire for most of those; your needs may vary. If you’ve used webCoRE, Rule Machine is quite different but more or less equally capable as of recent versions; but there are lots of built-in and community apps, so you might never need to use it. The Community is great, too.

I’m not sure, the hub is currently $75 USD and used to be listed for twice that (I have a few and usually only paid around $99), so I wouldn’t expect it to go much lower. But who knows. :slight_smile:

I have Hubitat at home and moved everything except my Neato Botvacs (those are still on ST since no one has ported the driver/app yet) over about 8 months ago. I’ve been very happy with it. I have 5 Red Series switches working beautifully, hoping to get more to replace a bunch of old original Z-Wave switches and hoping to get some Inovelli dimmers soon. All of the Inovelli features work without internet.

I also installed a Hubitat for my parents in their new house. They don’t have Internet but had a wired alarm system they didn’t want to pay monthly for so we converted all the wired contacts and siren to Hubitat via Konnected. They only have one Z-Wave Plus light switch, a RGB bulb, and some smart plugs, as well as zigbee sensors to use with the HSM. Of course without Internet they don’t get push alerts but they have the siren which the neighbors can hear, and we use a Aeon Labs Doorbell gen5 to announce issues if they’re home to hear it as well as change their RGB bulb different colors (Red Sieries switches weren’t ready yet in June) like blue for water detected or red for alarm or purple for garage door left open for more than 15 minutes at night. The dashboard works well without internet so they can always check the devices there on their tablet as well,

Since they don’t have internet I setup a WiFi router and registered the Hubitat hub at my house then brought them over and the only issue we had was when the hub does a nightly DB cleanup and backup it loses track of the date/time when it can’t talk to a NTP server, it also looses the time on reboots. I wrote a CURL script to set the time from a Windows computer (Blue Iris NVR) that is always on and that process runs as an at job each hour to make sure the hub doesn’t go more than an hour without knowing the correct time. They’ve been happy with it so far.

Has anyone found a device type for the red series on/off switches that works and allows local control of hue bulbs? I cannot handle the delay through the cloud is horrible (up to 1min worst case but 5 and 10 seconds frequently). I tried " [Z-Wave Multi Button] from the local device list (https://graph.api.smartthings.com/localDevice/list) and I got it working but it still shows as cloud execution and it’s still slow. I tried some other types and they listed as “local” but they didn’t work.

I looked it up per the smart things local control instructions and a z-wave device operating with an updated hue hub and the smart lighting app should be able to have local control (https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/209979766-Local-processing).

I’m fine loosing control of the LED strip and such if I can get the basic functionality to work faster.