I am a long time HA user, but for the last few years I have kinda let my HA just chug along, with no real work done on it. All I have done is do a monthly update to keep the installation up to date.
Heck, I didn’t even realize that Samsung had abandoned the Smartthings hub and infrastructure.
In the last few months a few of my light switches have gone offline from the Smartthings hub. Today I thought I would take some time to delete and re-add them. Imagine my surprise when I could not add a device, apparently any device.
So now I am looking for an alternative solution to the Smartthings hub hardware. Multiple hubs is ok, as long as they work together.
Here are my must-haves
Control of both Zigbee and Z-Wave devices via HA
Control of both Zigbee and Z-Wave devices via Alexa
Ability to add new devices to my home automation setup
The solution will hopefully have some sort of lifespan after all the work done to switch over.
Surely this is not impossible. I have been doing it for the last number of years. Please let me know any recommendation that you may have that will allow me to continue my home automation fun.
If you’re using the v2 or better Samsung hub then it’s still supported but you’re probably real adding everything. (they didn’t abandon the hub they updated how they run and moved away from the old groovy infrastructure)
That said, if it were mine and I prefer not to use a cloud connected service for my main lights (the connection from HA to SmartThings is still cloud) id take the opportunity to move away from st as a whole and get a ZWave and zigbee stick compatible with ZWaveJS /JsUI and ZHA /Zigbee2MQTT.
Grab a USB BT adapter, a Skyconnect and a Zooz ZST39 LR, this will cover you for the main protocols.
From there all you do is unpair the devices from the hub that you are using and pair them directly to HA, create your automation’s and pair your Alexa setup via Amazon Alexa - Home Assistant
The BT adapter will cover you for those, the Skyconnect will cover you for Zigbee and Thread (you can also install the matter integration to HA for those when you are ready to play with them) and the ZST39 LR will cover you in regards to Z-Wave based devices you want to control through the Z-Wave JS intergration.