Samsung SmartThings
About the vendor and its products
Samsung is of course an enormous corporation of different companies and product categories, including a broad selection of consumer products. The dividing line between what can be called smart home products and not is not perfectly clear, as more and more of “classic” products are getting smarter, be it white goods or home entertainment devices. But the core of Samsung’s solutions for smart homes is found under the brand name SmartThings, which was a company purchased by Samsung in 2014 and which offers several different types of products (the selection is continuously expanding, but notice that not all of these are for sale in Europe):
Base station, where SmartThings hub (2018) is the most recent version for Europe
Smart light bulb, based on Zigbee
Smart plugs, for different socket types, including the one we use in continental Europe
Sensors, for, e.g., motion, door/window, leakage, etc.
Surveillance camera, with two-way audio
Some additional components, like button and siren
Some might even want to include the Samsung smart TVs in this category, not to mention the company’s smart phones, tablet, smart white good, etc., but the focus of this page is SmartThings
The SmartThings, Connect, is used to set and program devices and automations. What separates Samsung SmartThings from many other manufacturers is that it also constitutes an independent platform/ecosystem. Devices based on both Z-Wave and Zigbee are supported and altogether a large number of devices from many manufacturers are compatible. In addition, there is support for Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and IFTTT, but no Apple Home support, unless going via Homebridge.
Our experiences
Notice that on phones, the table might only display in landscape mode
| Component | Room | Experiences |
|---|---|---|
SmartThings Hub (2018) base station |
Uninstalled |
This was installed with the original primary purpose of integrating a Fibaro Roller Shutter 2 (which controls a sun screen in the living room), but also as a test into the Z-Wave sphere, and the selection of Z-Wave components in the house has later been extended. This works fairly well, not in the least since the devices can be “ported” to Homebridge via the SmartThings app for Homebridge, and this has given med an extra “weapon” when considering solutions that don’t have native Apple Home support. My observation, however, is that adding devices is more cumbersome than what I am used to from Apple Home, but the system itself has been very stable. Sadly, the developer of the Homebridge integration stopped supporting the plugin and I therefore started to gradually migrate the devices over to Homey. Eventually I was able to decommission SmartThings altogether. |
Smart tumble dryer |
This is a competent tumble dryer and very useful with its smart functions, most of all the ability to see how long remains of a program and alerts when programs complete. |