Integration with Smart Home Hubs

[Koldo]

Hello,

Sorry if my questions is already answered but I have been searching in this forum and google and didn't find any concrete answer.

I was wondering if there are any libraries or any sdk prepared to integrate a device with the nrf51822 or any device of  the nrf52 family with commercial Smart Home Hubs like SmartThings from Samsung, Google Home Hub, Amazon Echo, Wink Hub or others. I know there is an SDK for HomeKit from Apple but need to know the possibility to connect to others.

Maybe I am misunderstanding something and there are just some steps to follow in order to make any device to work with these Hubs, but I cannot find anywhere which are these funcitons or services that need to be implemented in the firmware so my device could be connected to a Hub.

I would much appreciate your comments.

Thanks in advance

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Take a look at this blog post, which explains how you can interface a Nordic Thingy:52 to work with Amazon Alexa.

[IanAber]

Interesting but not what was asked. I believe Koldo was looking to connect via Zigbee directly to a home automation hub, which is exactly what I am trying to do but with no luck so far.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Normally, the "easiest"/standard solution is to hook up a Raspberry Pi to the internet & use that as a hub between the BLE device (51/52 DK or Nordic Thingy:52). The old IoT SDK has been integrated into the nRF5 SDK now, but the IoT documentation may still be useful to take a look at.

If any of the smart home hubs have a ble connection, it should theoretically be possible to connect to them.

I am not sure if we have any examples connecting directly to a home automation hub. I will ask internally & get back to both of you.

You could also use a nRF91 device as a gateway.

[awneil]

IanAber said:

connect via Zigbee

I don't think the nrf51 series supports Zigbee?

The nRF52840 does.

You would then have to study Amazon documentation for specific implementation details ...

[IanAber]

You are quite correct and this was my mistake. I am actually using the nRF52840 on the PCA10056 board. I am trying to get a Samsung Smartthings hub to recognise the board but so far I am not having much luck. I don't think this should be specific to Smartthings and it works with pretty much any generic Zigbee HA device so there must be something I am missing about the ZBOSS stack setup. I am using the light switch example having modified the channel to match that which the hub is using.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

It seems the Zigbee light bulb example can work with the Amazon Echo Plus device (see link). We have also gotten the light switch example working with the IKEA Trådfri light bulb (link 1, link 2).

[karelv]

Hello IanAber, I want nRF82840 to connect to smartthings hub using zigbee. Any progress so far?

[Patrick]

Fairly simple process, just change the channel the firmware is searching for to that of your hub and start the join process from the SmartThings app. You will also need to work on creating a device handler within SmartThings, or find one that handles the clusters you are using, to see data in the app.