Question

Is there any way to hook up chinese knock offs to smart things when their brand isn't on ST? I have 'yungtong' inline switches that are effectively knock off sonoff's but cant hook them up. Also have knock off bulbs that I cant find the beans name off in ST either

Answer 1

In short, yes! SmartThings supports almost all zigbee and zwave devices - either natively or through a custom device handler which defines its command set. Both zigbee and zwave are both "wireless standards" and "protocol definitions". that is, any zigbee hub can control a zigbee device as long as it knows what command to send to it. It doesn't have to "know" *how* to access it because the zigbee standard takes care of that. I'm guessing the devices you bought are wifi. In that case, every single device is different. That's because wifi is only the wireless standard - it does not define *how* to talk to something. Your device may or may not have a local API (it could only talk to something over a cloud) So you are hoping that someone has reverse-engineered that specific wifi device's API and then built a SmartThings device handler for it. This is not likely unless there are a ton of them out there for sale, like Sonoff. Hope that helps explain things.  

Comments

@alienee No it doesn't mean it isn't reverse engineer-able. If it were zigbee, you wouldn't have to reverse engineer it. It's wifi, so someone would need to spend the time to reverse engineer it which could be easy or very hard. Thankspically, devices are wifi OR zigbee OR zwave. It's exceptionally rare that a device has more than one of these (so it's safe to assume that if a device is wifi, it is NOT zigbee).  

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@alienee Anything that is wifi goes through your wifi hub/router. If it integrated with SmartThings, it would still go through your wifi router, because SmartThings does not "provide" a wifi network, so the communications from SmartThings to the device would still go through your wifi router. SmartThings only "provides" a zigbee and a zwave network.  

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@alienee Nope. Not how it works. Wifi is a "hub and spoke" protocol, not a "peer to peer" protocol. (there is ad-hoc wifi which is peer to peer, but that's not relevant or possible in this scenario)

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@alienee Well, you have two options here: 1) Use as many zigbee/zwave devices (instead of wifi) throughout your home to minimize wifi traffic 2) Use a better quality wifi router. I recommend BOTH. Good wifi routers/access points have no problems with hundreds of devices. Many of us here use "small business grade" networking equipment - the same stuff that has hundreds of people in a workplace using wifi. It's not cheap, but its still in the "hundreds of dollars" range and not the "thousands of dollars" range. Note that this makes your wifi reliable. meaning throughout your house. If a wifi device has a local API, then it doesn't even need internet, so the reliability of your internet doesn't matter. Note that all zigbee/zwave devices have, by definition, a local API.  

Answer 2

To be clear: you are ordering a Chinese “knockoff” device that not only will be hardwired to your electrical but also is able to do God knows what on your home network. To save a few bucks, that’s both a fire and a security risk. Be careful.  

Comments

There's a few things I wouldn't mind buying knock-offs on but definitely not something that's hardwired into my electrical boxes and could burn my whole house down.  

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Or anything requiring network credentials.  

Answer 3

Cheap people usually arent very bright.  

Comments

I wouldn’t go that far. Plenty of intelligent people who don’t know why buying stuff like that isn’t wise. So if you know, share that knowledge.  

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Yes, and don't just be a jerk.