SmartThings Groovy to Edge Drivers Change and Impact

Admin’s note: Moved this part of the reply from Show Off Your Dashboards to its own thread for further discussion.

I’d also like to hear from anyone in Smarthings beta and the “edge” / “matter” migration. Does this potential impact our dashboards? I understand all DTH apps will no longer work (unless recoded)?

I’m considering a move to Hubitat - but with 94 devices, not looking forward to the readding of every device to a new hub.

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Hey @Cory_Booth - I hope you don’t mind that I moved this part of your Show Off Your Dashboards post to it’s own thread – I figured it would likely generate some discussion and is a good topic with the upcoming SmartThings platform changes. :slight_smile:

SmartThings recently started rolling out first-party Edge Drivers to production for newly onboarded devices and they plan on migrating first-party Groovy DTHs automatically at some point in the future (though time will tell what this actually looks like).

If you’re using community Groovy DTHs, you’ll either have to switch back to the standard first-party SmartThings DTHs so you can auto-migrate to Edge Drivers, manually move to an equivalent Edge Driver if there is one*, or the DTH will stop working when Groovy is sunset.

A key caveat to moving from a custom DTH to a community edge driver is anytime a device is removed from SmartThings and re-onboarded, it gets created as a completely new device. That means that any rules/automations you’ve built in SmartThings, or any SmartApps that used the ‘old’ reference to the device are no longer valid. So you have to update your rules or SmartApps to reference the ‘new’ instance of the device. That means that SharpTools also sees it as a brand new device, so it would impact your dashboards.

As you might surmise, the simplest approach from a migration perspective is to use built-in DTHs that automatically get transitioned to drivers so all the references stay the same.

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Good point…

It sounds like beta testers started getting migrated last month. I was interested until I saw you had to remove and readd each device during the Alpha/Beta program.

But, you are right, I need to review my devices and see if any can be flipped back to OOTB device handlers. Fortunately, after the move from the classic app, I got rid of many of the “custom” DTH. I still have a few, for example the Z-Wave window/door sensor I have wired to a relay, which is wired to the smoke alarms - for smoke. I should check with RBoy :slight_smile:

All this said, I assume, given ST is just an interface into the Smarthings Devices, that this migration to “edge” (or “matter” as sounds like) won’t impact our functionalities (aside from maybe automations)…

I suspect their goal is a 1:1 mapping of functionality, but we’ll have to see what comes of it. There are some legacy drivers with some unique implementations, so I suspect there might be some edge cases where some of that gets cleaned up… but for your standard switches and sensors it sounds like they’re targeting a clean cutover.