Thinking what I can do with my Smartthings to make it useful and not throw it away. I see I can use presence with Smartthings through HA. However I’m also curious if I can use Smartthings to support zigbee? I have a few zigbee iris contact sensors but thinking about getting some of the Smartthings sensors. Will this be a good setup? Having the sensor talk through Smartthings to Ha? Will it be fast if I use all local device handlers in Smartthings which is local?
I tried using the SmartThings bridge with Home Assistant for a number of months. When it works, it works well… when it doesn’t work, it can be a headache because there are so many points of failure (smartthings, smartthings-ha bridge smartapp, mqtt listener, home assistant)…
I was constantly having to stop and restart everything because something crashed or got out of sync… granted, I also didn’t have the most stable server at the time… so that was some of my problem… but I got all my zigbee stuff moved to HA and it’s been great.
I would highly recommend just getting a zigbee stick on using everything on HA.
I use smartthings to control my Sengled classic elements bulb (zigbee) and it works great. Basically you would control your Zigbee devices on the ST with MQTT. The only issue I have had is that the ST hub is very sensitive to internet connectivity. If your internet drops out for some reason, the ST hub, seems to have a hard time reconnecting on its own.
Samsung said that they had addressed this issue on their latest firmware, but from my tests, the problem still seems to exist. With that said, my internet connection is stable most of the time (the problem is more to do with my crappy router)., so if you have a good stable connection, you’ll probably be happy with the the ST
Another advantage is the zigbee protocol. Since Zigbee doesn’t use your home router for connectivity to your devices it won’t bog down your network or router. Theoretically, it can support thousands of devices. In contrast, you can probably get only like 50-60 wifi devices working on a really good router before it start to crap out. Also, Zigbee is a mesh topology, so each device will talk to and amplify the signal to the next device. So again, theoretically, you can have a zigbee device that is really far away from the hub, as long as there are other zigbee devices in between.
Stable for me for several months. I use the Smartthings as ZWAVE & ZIGBEE Protocol provider for Hassio. On top, i can feed my HA devices into ST which in turn makes them available on Alexa and Google very easily. Also the custom devices can be displayed on my Smartthings Dashboard on my Samsung Phone… all in all… currently its the best of both worlds. However, i would love it if ST would enable a local API (similar to Philips Hue) because currently if Internet is down there will be no updates from the ST Hub to my HA.