The BEST Ways To Integrate Aqara And SmartThings! (5 Methods Explained)

aara makes some of the most inexpensive smart home gear out there today they make great sensors unique controllers and strong products especially when you consider the pricing now Samsung smart things is one of the largest smart home platforms and it holds great compatibility with lots of different makers plus it has one of the most robust automation systems out there today so being able to combine these two systems is a big deal and today I'm going to walk you through the different methods that you can bring in a car products into smart things and how you can make these two Brands work together really well which has been difficult [Music] traditionally hello automator thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automat your life and I want to get right into the first and the easiest method but this is only going to work with a few products from aara and you're seeing those on screen now now the first method will require just a smart things Hub and then the aara product and then of course the smart things app you will not require any aara hubs and you will get almost all of the features you would get if you brought these products into a Cara app I'll address what you could be missing in a moment but since most of these products are zigg be your smart things Hub will require zigg you should notice that the top device in that list is a thread product though so for that one you need a thread radio now the main hubs for Samsung smart things today both include a zigg and a thread radio so you can go and purchase an aot Tech smart home hub or a smart things station and use everything on this list now if you have something like a family Hub fridge you just need to get the smart things dongle and that includes both a zigg b and a thread radio so out of that whole list I have just a couple of products that I can directly pair this is called the aara pet feeder C1 and uh you can see it has a blue light on it it's plugged in and what you're going to find with most aara products is they have a link button usually it's much smaller but I'm just going to hold this and eventually we will see that start to Blink then we can let go and it's ready to start pairing now inside of smart things we can add a device going to hit the plus and I'm going to hit add device and then I'm going to choose partner devices hitting add there you can do a search but aara is up here at the top now you can add without a QR code cuz you're not going to have that for most of these and you can see I have a pet feeder here now I have to have a hub that says zigg on it so I'm going to choose my aotech Hub and now it's searching for devices that are ready to pair now we're just going to wait if it doesn't immediately pair you might have to get the device closer to your Hub to get it to work but there you go it's shown up now in some cases you can tap on things but in general just hit done it will have dropped into a room somewhere you don't know where that is so what I like to do is go to all devices and then I search so I hit the three little dots and I just search there there's my aara pet feeder C1 I can go into the details and we're starting to see uh a few things we can do now one of the first things you want to do is you want to put it into the room that you would like it to live in I created some a car rooms and you can also uh change the name of the device every device is going to look different but it is important to go into the settings understand what settings you have access to and it's important to go into the driver so you can see that the driver that has now been added to my Hub that teaches the smart things Hub how to use this device is called aara feeder now for the pet feeder I also have a serving option so uh this is something with how the device works specifically and I can just up and down that and then you hear it running I don't have any food in there obviously we can use it inside of routine so we can check what kind of conditions we have so we can see whether it's feeding or in standby mode and we can see which power source it's on and then in terms of actions we can actually start the pet feeder and if we'd like we could delay it uh if we had some reason to delay it so those are the specific conditions and the specific actions that we get with this device but you're going to be able to just go into routines hit that add routine and you'll be able to check out what you can do with your specific aara device just by going from this main page over to routines of course with every new device you have a history page as well one of the things that might get you about that method is you could be missing some of the settings and some of the features from your aara product that's because if you integrate them directly with an aara Hub these products tend to work the best and that's where the next method I think might be the best for most of you this is also the newest method it's called the matter Bridge integration and what it allows you to do is to use an aara Hub as the bridge for connection into your smart things Hub or into smart things in the past we would use things like hubs to make connections to other smart home systems so this doesn't actually feel any different than things that happened four or 5 years ago however the difference with a matter Bridge connection is that everything is happening locally inside of your homes Network and it does not require any Cloud connectivity or your homes connection to the internet in other words so this essentially connects the two hubs you have in your home together and it brings in a number of aara devices at the same time the other benefit to this method is that you will get to manage the settings for all of aar's products in their app this will give you access to the most settings and the most features overall and you will also still have access to aar's automation engine which in many cas cases is just as powerful as smart things one other benefit that I found with this integration method is that I've been able to delete devices I didn't want integrated with smart things even if they were in the matter bridge I haven't seen them return as of yet uh but that's a nice feature to have it lets you pick and choose what you'll notice with that option is there a lot more in the list and this list will continue to expand and get better because this is a place that aara is is focused now in order to use any of those products you have to have an aara Hub and you have to turn on its matter Bridge feature here are the acara hubs today that can be used as a matter bridge this list will also expand but you can purchase these now and now I'm going to show you how to do this full integration today as you go into the acar app you might find that when you go into the Hub page you get this little little popup and this actually would allow you to start the process that I'm about to show you I'm going to hit the little X if you don't get that pop up I got to show you how to do things in order to get these items bridged across using our matter bridg is a little bit of prep work we have to do here but the biggest piece of prep work is to be attaching your smart home devices to the right hub now what I mean by that I have two hubs in my home this camera Hub G3 and then I have the Hub M2 down here now if I go into either of the detail Pages for those hubs what we should see today is it says matter in the menu and then it says bridged accessories and then we'll have a number beside that now if I go and I add this camera Hub G3 to smart things I have zero brid bridged accessories and in order to have bridged accessories you have to add accessories to this Hub so this Cube I would have to attach it to that Hub to get it to show up here in smart things now because I've already added a number of devices to my M2 Hub I'm going to connect that one into smart things you can see come in to the settings for that Hub I can see m and bridged accessories and it says nine devices and that's because these have all been attached to that Hub M2 over time just as I set up new devices that's the Hub I'm attaching them to now if you don't see either of these two options go into your firmware upgrade make sure you're on the latest version you can see the version that I'm on right now I have those options and because I have those options I can tap into matter and this is where we'll start the process of moving all these devices across so I can go into connected ecosystems and you can see that I have connected this bridge to Apple home kit and that enforces Apple keychain and Google home right now but we want to connect it to Samsung smart things so in order to do that we're going to hit matter pairing code so this is our code right here and if you're on the same phone you can actually just copy that pairing code but I'm going to show you on a separate thing here so I'm going in smart things now I'm going to hit add device and normally you'll go into here hit add and you'll choose matter you're not going to choose a Cara in this case now we could scan this QR code but in a lot of cases you're going to be switching between apps so I'm going to hit add without QR code and we're going to type in that code now what you'll notice right here is it says that the connection valid time is only for the uh next 9 minutes after that you'll get a new code okay so it's not like you only get 9 minutes in one single time you just this specific code only works for a bit now it's going to prepare your device connect to your device and what it's actually connecting to is your aara Hub in this case now it's registering it to smart things I've seen this fail a few times here and there you might have to try and do this a couple of times but you can see our M2 Bridge was added to smart things so what you'll see is from this list of bridged accessories you're going to see basically the full list came over now it's going to depend on whether these devices that you put in as a bridged accessory are part of that big list of devices that are capable of this but from here you can go into each aara device you can rename them if you would like I'm just going to leave them with the the name that they have but if you want you can edit them and then you can change the room that they are going into once I'm good with the name and of course we can change what room and what name they have at any time but once I'm good I just hit done and now I have control of all of those different devices okay so everything's been brought in I tried to move everything to the aara room Bridge room okay yeah that's what I called it um but actually the T1 Pro Cube just the the first device moved in but you'll notice they split out the T1 so you could have a few devices that end up in different rooms that's why I use that search function so for that I would have to go in and move everything across using the edit button to the room that I would like it to be in so there I just moved T1 pro4 into there just like it was with our previous device I have have access to edit change the name change the room it's in I can also go in to the driver information and in certain cases I will have settings you'll notice I have this share with other services that's a feature of matter I'm going to talk about that today and then I have the controls you can see I'm bringing in the battery which is very low on my Smart Lock at this point and we can see whether it's being tampered and I don't know if you could hear that but it did unlock right there you can see that status over here on the other phone now of course with all of these you're going to have access to creating routines so again whichever device you're in just go from the controls page over to the routines Page hit the plus and you're going to be able to find out which conditions you have access to and which actions you have access to so looks like we could unlock our aara smart loock u00 which is pretty rare to be able to do actually so that's a very beneficial action and it all comes through our matter bridge now I want to show you one other thing that's so important with this if I go into the aara Hub look what happens we can see all of those different devices that are attached to that Hub uh we also have the ability to edit that device and we can go into the driver now it says matter switch that doesn't really matter but this gives us the quick ability to go between all of our different devices that have come in through this matter Bridge with a car I wanted to give you a couple of examples of things working well with the matter bridge and some things that are not working so well the Smart Lock U 100 really excellent I can press the button I can unlock it you actually hear that going on in the background and in routines very useful here because we can actually send an unlock request to the Smart Lock so I'm just going to create a manually run routine so I can even include an unlock inside of a routine from smart things send that over something else that is very useful is the curtain driver E1 this a very good product from them and they have really good integration with this it opens and closes as I do this you have a preset position that you can send it to at any time and the configuration's all done here in a Cara's application so you make sure that it's all work from here now this is my flick twist and it's been set up with two scenes in smart things so the window shades are going to open when I get to the top and the window shades are going to close those are routines or manually run routines that I set up in smart things so you can see how fast that response is with a car through the matter bridge and with flick there it goes another thing that I found very useful with this method is the wireless mini switch so as soon as I press that you can see that it's sending that command there's a double press and I can hold for a third function I can create routines with all of that so this is very useful for a very inexpensive switch the cube T1 Pro you know they give you six different devices here unfortunately for this I haven't been able to get it to work so this is the sixth side so when I flip it this way it should say that it was pressed and actually I've created an automation it won't send that notification to me and I have verified that it's connected and working you can go into this this see it says it was flipped to side six unfortunately that one doesn't seem to be working for me yet but I imagine it will be fine after some time now the Dual relay module T2 I have that offline at the moment but you'll see two independent controls that you have there so that's really nice for that device so a lot of these things are working really well the LED strip T1 all these new products are working really well there just a few things that aara and smart things have to get worked out one of the things that both of the previous methods do is they give you local control that means you don't require the internet for your automations to work and it's all very quick in terms of responses but now all of those devices should have an edge driver or a good Edge driver associated with them and if you don't know what an edge driver is it's just s Samsung's way of teaching their Hub how to use the device that you have connected to it the edge driver is stored on your smart things Hub and so that's how all of this is happening on your network The Edge driver in this case teaches My Hub how to control and to modify the different settings that are available for the E1 curtain driver the initial ones that are installed when you integrate these products into smart things are not necessarily the best ones although they are the official ones that aara and the smart things team have decided work best with these devices so you can go and search online for Edge drivers for any of aar's products and you might find something better you can always try it out and then if you don't like it you can undo that now what you end up doing is finding the link to the edge driver online online often these are posted on the community Pages uh for Samsung smart things they actually have a communities board and you will click on that link and it will bring you to a page that forces you to log into smart things you'll have to use the same credentials you use with your smart things app and then it will ask you to install the driver on the Hub you often have to go through a couple of pages here to pick the driver uh because lots of these links have multiple Edge drivers within them now once you've done that you then have to go to the device inside of smart thing so in this case let's say we wanted to change the driver for our E1 curtain here we would enter into the devices Details page hit those top three dots and choose driver which allows us to look at the driver being used then we can choose to change the driver the drivers that show up as an option are the ones that will potentially work with this device so it only shows up as an option if it's usable with the product you have so if you've installed something and it doesn't show up as an option it's definitely not compatible now the good news is if you don't like it you can always go back but I have another method to share with you and this next method is really easy to explain that's just because it's the usage of the relatively new matter standard it's very similar to how we did both of the previous two methods and actually today I believe there's only one product this will work with that is the new door sensor P2 with thread for this to work you need Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned on on your phone but Android users will see a popup on their phone immediately when they pull the battery Tab out to bring the device online you'll then tap a few buttons scan the QR code for matter and through this process you'll choose smart things you'll also get this kind of a popup if you're in the smart things app on iOS or Android this requires a setting to be turned on in the menu section so enter into there then go into the gear icon then look for ask to add new devices and make sure that's turned on then when you pull the battery Tab and waited few seconds you should see a similar popup for this new device that's the easiest way to bring matter devices into smart things today as far as I'm concerned now if you don't get those popups simply head into the add device Tab and then find the matter option then you'll scan that QR code and you'll add the device like any other from there but what if you set up an aara matter device in another platform already like Apple homekit Google home or Amazon well you're able to share matter devices from other platforms to smart things but the process is a little different per system so I won't show you them all instead here's how you do it with homekit you find the aara matter product you'd like to share go into the settings for the device and then turn on pairing mode copy that code you've been given and then head to smart things then add a matter device as you would any other but instead of scanning the QR code we're going to choose to enter that code we got from homekit other systems can be simpler than this but this is probably the most involved method of sharing products so that's why I'm showing you it there's only really that one device the P2 again for this method but this will become more and more used as we go forward again as with the other methods there will be Edge drivers required and you will get an initial one that is likely the officially supported one but then you might need to change the Ed driver The Edge driver to something you would like to use now before matter came along we used these integration methods where we would connect accounts between Platforms in the past you went to the Amazon skill store and you found aara there then you would hit enable skill and you would put in your credentials to aar's app it was a very similar process for Google and there you're really just hitting added device but you end up in the same place of putting in your credentials for a Cara's app so the next method utilizes that older way to integrate platforms and we will essentially use Amazon Andor Google as a crutch to do this there are some more complex ways to do this with apple homekit but the real power of this is that you connect Samsung into either Amazon or Google and then you connect aara into that same system then you use something called a virtual device to make it so you can start a routine with anything from either app or system today I cannot use the G4 video doorbell with smart things and that might change in the future I'm going to talk about that in a second CU you know matter is about to get cameras but I cannot take the doorbell ringing and then start a routine in smart things at least not easy but what I can do is by connecting both of those platforms into Amazon is to start a routine in Amazon when the G4 doorbell is rung and then pass that over to smart things that will open up further options for integrating with Amazon Google and actually many other product lineups so when you learn this you are essentially set free to integrate anything with smart things now here's how you do this method okay now there's a couple of things going on that I have to tell you about before we get into this aara this G4 video doorbell is set up in a Cara's app and it speaks with its a little Hub here its little chime the other thing is this is a Z-Wave smart plug okay and it is set up in Samsung smart things now I'm in the Amazon miss a application and we're going to go to skills and games you have to do this with both aara and smart things so I typed in aara into the search bar and you can see that I've already enabled the skill put in my credentials you saw that a little earlier in the video but you're going to do the same thing with smart things and again if it says enable skill you have to enable that and it will connect everything from smart things into Amazon and when you do it with a Cara it will connect everything that can be connected into Amazon again that means all of these devices are going to show up in Amazon's device list or device page just to show you that this is set up in Amazon and that it's working I'm going to head into cameras and here's my smart video doorbell G4 but now that we're connected into Amazon we need to do a little bit of work with smart things now here is a link I will leave down below it goes to what's called Vedge Creator this creates a virtual device and actually it can create multiple of them within smart things the instructions are pretty easy use this channel link we're going to tap on that link once it's been installed scann for nearby devices and then open the new creator device to the control screen I'll show you that in a second so the first step is always to tap on that link and now we're installing an edge driver from T Austin he's the guy who's created this on our smart things account now the first thing I have to do is log in so I'm logged in and it brought me to this page now I have three hubs inside of smart things you might just have one but the first step is to hit enroll on whichever Hub you'd like to use and then you tap into available drivers then what you're going to find is down in this list he's got a lot of drivers in here you have virtual devices V2 and I've hit install and now that's installed on that specific Hub the next step is in smart things itself so I'm going to devices I'm going to hit plus I'm going to hit add device and now I'm just going to hit scan nearby and because I have those multiple hubs I have to select the Hub and I have installed that device on the aot tech Hub so that's what I've selected now I have Ved Creator 2.94 that's been installed and that's now been added to my home so I'm just going to search for that and here it is now what you have to do with this utility is decide the quantity to create and then you're going to select the type or the the different types that you would like to create many of these will be able to start a routine in Amazon and many of them will not but the Creator uh Todd is his name you know he created this Amazon switch that you can use both ways in this case okay and I'll show you what I mean by that but it has now created this Vedge Amazon switch one and we can use this within routines so just like we were doing before I can hit plus and you can see if this gets turned on or off it's turned on or it's turned off or there's a contact sensor I know that seems confusing open or closed open or closed we can use any of those to start a routine in smart things and also we can use smart things to turn it on turn it off etc etc okay so we have good actions and good conditions to start our routines I'm going to go back to the Amazon app I think this is just the easiest way to go about things because I've connected smart things into Amazon that device that new Vedge device that was just created has been shared into smart things it's already here so I'm going to go into your routines and I'm going to hit the plus now my my new routine my new event is going to be when the doorbell rings so I'm choosing smart video doorbell G4 and when it's pressed that will start my routine of course I could add in some additional conditions like the time of day but then what do I want to do well I want to affect that device that virtual device that we just created in smart things now I happen to know it should be sitting here here inside of switches and because it's called V Edge I know it's down towards the Bottom now I can choose to turn that switch on or off based on this being rung so I'm going to choose on okay and then I'm going to hit save so when that doorbell is pressed we're turning that on we could do other things inside of that routine if we'd like but now we go to smart things and remember we've already started creating this routine so if this gets turned on then let's do something here in smart things now I have this currently turned on but we're going to turn that on based on this doorbell happening so this is called my aot tech Outlet it used to be on my downstairs TV we're just going to turn that on so this routine when that gets turned on will turn on my outlet so right now this is off and we're going to try and run this on on see how fast that was it's remarkably fast it won't always be that fast okay I don't want you thinking it's going to be that good every time but that was remarkably fast and that's cuz this is happening on the smart things Hub and lots of the communication to this that's happening locally this is talking to to Amazon in a lot of cases very quickly you can see how fast this is going guys that's excellent I honestly could not have hoped for that to go that well wow now there's a lot going on right now and you know what I thought I would just show that like I have the Philips Hue tap dial switch this is in smart things and I can change the dimmer I can swipe left it's gone to 24% I can swipe right it's going to 100% this is all just happening through integration we did with the matter Bridge with the accara strip I can also use the buttons I'm just toggling it uh so whenever I press it it's turning on or off but the thing with this and the thing with the the T1 inside of smart things and where this method with Amazon will really help us is that I don't have access to like these really fan fancy scenes that you can do with aar's LED strip T1 there's actually a ton of dynamic scenes so what we're going to do is we're going to set this up as a controller to use those scenes with the T1 so I'm going to go in to the Hue tap dial switch that I've integrated with smart things and we're just going to use the fourth button so I'm going to go all the way down here to the fourth button now what what will this fourth button do well it's going to turn on our Vedge device so here's the V Edge miss a switch and what we're going to do is we're going to turn it off in this case Okay so we're going to hit that action but now what we're going to do inside of Amazon's routines is we're going to use that to drive an automation to turn this to a fancier effect okay so when this happens now because of the type of virtual device I created it can start a routine over here in Amazon so I'm going to scroll all the way to the bottom here's my Vedge Amazon switch now the tricky thing is you can see it's basing it off of a contact sensor status okay so I'm going to try close and then we're going to take an action with the T1 switch now the really nice thing with that integration between aara is that all your scenes come in okay so with aara into smart thing so I have one called Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs it's kind of a silly scene but so when this switch closes this will then uh run that scene I also created a second routine that when that switch opens okay then we're going to start another aara scene and therefore over here what I'm going to do is I'm going to go held so when this button is held then we are going to turn on that virtual switch so now what I have is when I'm hitting button four we're turning off the Amazon switch and when I'm holding this button we're turning it on and in Amazon when it opens or it closes we're doing different effects here now I'm going to hold there it goes so now I'm sitting inside of the Vedge switch and I'm going to hold that and you see it turned that on and now it ran the Amazon routine to change it to this effect now I'm going to hit this and it's turning that off and now it's running this other effect now here's kind kind of the statement I would make so I just pressed the button you saw it triggered that way if I try and run this right away again sometimes it will work and there it just did sometimes it won't so what I find with Amazon routines is it takes a little bit number one to get them to run reliably and then number two sometimes if you're trying to run it too often it won't work every time before I go on to the final me method I want to talk about one thing that a lot of you are probably wondering about you know I said the G4 video doorbell it couldn't come into smart things the fp2 sensor today uh that's the presence sensor from a Cara that cannot come in smart things and that's where some of these later integration methods are going to be so beneficial to you now with the matter standard we're going to see cameras come in and that's going to open open up some opportunities for aara to give us more products that will work through matter with smart things and I do think they will take advantage of that so you should see things like uh the the cameras the G4 here the G3 uh all of those cameras from aara I get the sense lots of them are going to come but aara cannot comment at this time because they have to make sure everything works things like the fp2 I know that has an eventual matter integration whether it comes to smart things I don't know so some of the acara devices you're not going to be able to integrate today but more and more are coming over time but this is where the final method might give you some of those older devices and get them into smart things now this method is by far the most difficult and it's definitely the one that is fraught with the most issues there are many a Cara Smart Home Products available today that are a little bit older and they work in a slightly different way than some of their neww gear I think initially aara had wanted to produce products that only worked within their own system and then maybe worked with Amazon Apple and Google but over time they've moved to being more and more compatible but some of their older products can be used with smart things but there's a huge caveat here now most of those older products are zigg and I saw this explained perfectly just the other day so I'm going to credit this person and explain it in their words see zigg devices can connect to zigby Hubs generally so we should be able to connect this zigg motion sensor to the smart things Hub but zigg has always allowed some custom things to happen and without going in too deep aara did this with their devices for a while and it messed up integration with with smart things and actually other hubs too now Michael who explained this so well stated that smart things hubs have this fix now and that's why we can connect many of the older devices into smart things however you'll notice where Michael correctly states that repeaters don't generally have this fixed in case you don't know what a zigby repeater is it's a device that normally is plugged into the wall so you'll see it on plug light switches not often light bulbs and you will see statement in marketing materials or on the sales pages that says this device is a zigby repeater what it does is it repeats the zigg signal so you know if this is outside of the range of the zigg radio on our Hub we need something somewhere in the middle that will take that signal and say I got you I'm going to connect with this guy over here that device called a repeater doesn't generally have this fix in smart things so whenever you're connecting an older device from aara to smart things it has to be close enough to the hub to not use a repeater even worse is you can't control the path so sometimes even though the repeater is over here it'll still do that and if your Hub ever decides or your network ever decides to use the repeater to connect to a device like this you're going to end up with a device that says it's offline and you will no longer be able to connect to it you'll end up having to reset the device and redo everything now Michael also mentions a couple of repeaters that he thinks will work within this kind of a scheme and uh one of the things he mentions there is an Ikea Outlet now that's not something I've specifically tested so I'm not going to recommend it but if there is anyone out there who has tried it and it is working that would be a comment I would pin on this video so you guys can check that but essentially if you prepare the aara product for pairing which on almost every product they have a tiny button and you just hold it for a few seconds then you'll be able to scan for devices using your Hub and your Hub should find it I'll tell you that sometimes it takes a few tries for you to get the device to to be recognized and to connect but there are very few devices that will not pair and when you're doing that I would say take your repeaters offline and get close to the hub that will ensure the initial connection is being done directly with the Hub however it does not guarantee that once you reconnect those repeaters your device won't move over to that so that's where you're going to want to place these types of aara products very close to your smart things H each time you use this method you will need to identify an edge driver that's going to work with that device sometimes they're a little hard to find now I identified a large number of these aara devices and the edge drivers you would need and showed you how to get them connected and working in a video that identifies all the best Edge drivers that you'll want with Samsung smart things so if you're using smart things at all this video will help you big time I have everything from that Vedge Creator to a way to count things in your home I was able to integrate my personal computer and I showed things like tuya and aara devices getting connected and working with smart things that video is up on screen now and there are time codes in the description so you can move to the section you would like to tackle today it's a great resour so I hope you will check that out and get smart things working much better in your home otherwise thanks for watching today and of course don't hate automate

Channel: Automate Your Life

Views: 26,278

Keywords: smart home, home automation, smartthings aqara, aqara and smartthings, aqara with smartthings, aqara, samsung smartthings, aqara fp2, aqara smart home, smartthings edge, samsung smartthings hub, aqara hub, aqara smartthings, smartthings aqara edge driver, samsung smartthings aqara, matter smart home, samsung smartthings news, samsung smartthings edge, smartthings, automate your life, samsung smartthings setup, xiaomi aqara

Id: 8GAs4bLWPyI

Length: 43min 51sec (2631 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2023