smartthings lcd panel factory

I stumbled across a young startup: SmartThings. A home automation platform built for developers from the ground up. They have a cloud-based development environment that allows you to create smart apps and custom device types to talk to, and ... wait for it ... yes, microcontroller-based devices over ZigBee!! They even have an Arduino shield you can use to hack together a prototype.

It was the perfect storm. I had an open platform (SmartThings), an open protocol to talk to it (ZigBee), and years’ worth of awesome Propeller-based devices that could take advantage of it. So, last April, I created a standards-based ZigBee object for the Parallax Propeller that allows my devices to communicate based on the ZigBee HA public profile. It opened a huge door of opportunity for my devices. Now, I can make a device, connect it to the SmartThings hub over ZigBee, and control it with my iPhone. All this and I don’t have to write one line of code that runs on the iPhone!! My device identifies itself to the SmartThings hub, tells it what it is capable of, and the SmartThings hub then determines how to control it.

One of my ZigBee HA projects — the CoopBoss (Chicken Coop Door controller) — won Best in Show at SmartThings. They did a nice write-up on the CoopBoss; if you’re interested, you can check it out at

J - ZigBee Radio: The ZigBee radio is from Digi International; the part number is XBP24CZ7UIS-004. This radio securely communicates with the SmartThings hub that connects to the SmartThings cloud on the Internet. A smartphone app (SmartThings Custom Device Type) allows secure control of the CoopBoss over the Internet.

This project and several others like it have been very rewarding. I would like to share my experiences with focus on the ZigBee communications. The real story here is not the circuit, but how you can take a simple circuit and make it into a full blown solution by connecting it to the IoT. To accomplish this, I have laid out a simple “hello world” test circuit in “The Controlling a Custom Device with SmartThings” section of this article. It’s an LED tied to a Propeller and a ZigBee radio. We will gradually add complexity to the circuit as we go deeper into the protocol.

Why is this important to a device maker? Let’s say you want to make a device that has an LED, and you want to turn the LED on or off remotely. If your device follows the guidelines detailed by the On/Off Cluster, then your device can be controlled by the exact same ZigBee enabled wall switch discussed above. Let’s take that one step further. Replace the ZigBee enabled wall switch with a smartphone application. Say you have an existing home automation solution with a smartphone application that controls your ZigBee enabled lights (like SmartThings). Since your LED device adheres to the ZigBee On/Off cluster commands, it is now possible to control the LED by that same smartphone app! Your device just joined the Internet of Things!

This project is going to focus on the radio hardware setup and communications required to talk to a ZigBee HA network hub (SmartThings) over ZigBee standard Clusters. We will use a Propeller microcontroller connected to a Digi XBee ZB radio to communicate with the hub. The circuit is simple and you can use any number of existing Propeller prototype boards.

Each ZigBee profile has stringent security requirements that must be met before a device is allowed to join a network. Your SmartThings hub uses the ZigBee Home Automation profile security model, so we will need to configure our radio to meet those specs. To make a ZigBee network secure, each network generates its own unique network encryption key used to encrypt network packets. Your device must have this key to communicate, and that is all taken care of during the network “join” process.

The ZigBee coordinator’s (SmartThings hub) primary role during a join is to give your radio the network key and allow it to join the network. To get the network encryption key from the coordinator, our radio must be configured with the proper trust center link key. Think of it as a password you must give the coordinator before it will give you the network encryption key.

Once this step is complete, your radio is programmed to join any ZigBee HA network; you won’t have to do this again. As soon as you reset your radio, it will start looking for an open ZigBee HA network to join. To allow it to join the network, you will need to tell SmartThings to open the network and allow a new device to join. (More on this later. For now, you can unplug your radio and move on to the next step.)

On pin 13 of the Propeller Mini, we connect a 10K ohm pull-up resistor and pushbutton to ground. This button will also be used to control the LED and send commands to SmartThings.

The XBee radio will look for a network to join that matches its security settings. Every time you see “FF” displayed on the screen, it is searching on a new channel; “23” means it found a valid coordinator but it is not allowing it to join at this time. To allow our device to join, we have to open the network for joining. Proceed to the next step to join the SmartThings network.

From your smartphone, open the SmartThings app (Figure 11) and go to the Marketplace; scroll until you see “Connect New Device” as shown in Figure 12. Tap on “Connect New Device” to tell SmartThings to open the network and let new devices join. After a few minutes, you should see the WeMo Bulb pop up on the bottom part of your smartphone’s screen (Figure 12). We are impersonating that device and you can tap to configure it and change its name to “My LED” or just tap “Done” to accept the defaults.

Back on your Parallax Serial Terminal screen, you will notice that ZigBee packets are starting to flow as shown in Figure 13. Your device has joined the SmartThings Home Automation network and now can be controlled with your smartphone.

Bang! Your LED will turn on and off as you push the button (Figures 14 and 15). Since SmartThings is cloud-based, you will be able to take your smartphone anywhere you have cell phone or Wi-Fi signal and control your LED.

In a follow-up article, we will walk through the code details of what’s going on behind the scenes and add more functionality to our device by adding support for the Level Cluster that will allow us to dim the LED, and ZigBee binding that will allow us to push the button and change the status of our LED in SmartThings in real time. NV

An over-the-air update coming later this month will turn Samsung’s standalone SmartThings hubs into controllers for the new smart home standard Matter. The v2 hub will control Matter devices over Wi-Fi and ethernet, while the current hub and SmartThings dongle will also act as Thread border routers. Samsung is the first company to publicly announce Matter certification.

Jaeyeon Jung, Samsung Electronics corporate vice president and head of SmartThings’ mobile experience business, told The Verge in an interview that the company received its Matter certification early on Wednesday, October 12th, a week after Matter launched. Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which oversees Matter, confirmed that it started issuing certifications this week and said Samsung was among the very first to secure one. Samsung said the certification is for the hubs, with the timeline for the dongle certification still being determined.

During the Samsung Developer Conference Keynote this week, Mark Benson, head of SmartThings, announced Matter support would be rolled out to its platform this month. Jung confirmed to The Vergefollowing the keynote that Samsung plans to push over-the-air updates to all existing v2 and v3 SmartThings hubs and the SmartThings app on Android. The SmartThings dongle and the software-based SmartThings hubs built into newer Samsung smart TVs, monitors, and Family Hub fridges will be upgraded to support Matter at a later date, says Jung.

While the upgraded hubs will still support Zigbee and Z-Wave, they won’t be Matter bridges, at least not anytime soon. “We don’t have a plan to support that function yet,” says Jung. “SmartThings users will be able to continue to use those devices connected to a SmartThings hub, but existing Zigbee and Z-Wave devices won’t be exposed to Matter.”

The good news is that SmartThings v3 hubs (now made by Aeotec) and the $35 dongle for Samsung appliances with SmartThings software hubs will become Thread border routers. “We worked with Silicon Labs to use software to simultaneously run Zigbee and Thread using the same hardware chipset,” says Jung. “Once we roll out the software, SmartThings v3 hubs will support both Zigbee and Matter over Thread devices, along with the dongle, too.”

This means if you have a compatible Samsung smart TV or smart fridge and you pick up the $35 dongle, you’ll have a SmartThings Matter controller with a Thread border router ready to go when the update arrives. Of course, there are no Matter devices available to control yet. But with the launch of the standard last week, we should see products start to roll out this year.

Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Apple Home are some of the big smart home platforms signed on to support Matter. Apple and Samsung have already updated their compatible hubs to be Matter controllers, and we expect to see updates arriving on the other platforms shortly.

In addition to not exposing Zigbee or Z-Wave devices connected to the SmartThings hubs to Matter, Jung says Samsung has no plans to add its smart TVs or appliances to Matter as devices, meaning they will only be controllable through the SmartThings app and not other Matter controllers. TVs are in the first Matter spec, but appliances are not. (Samsung is a member of the Home Connectivity Alliance — an organization of major appliance manufacturers aiming to do for appliances what Matter is doing for the smart home, so someday you could control an LG washing machine in the SmartThings app and vice versa. The Vergesawa demo of this, but there’s no launch timing yet).

Jung says Samsung’s smart appliance ecosystem is one of the reasons the company thinks consumers will choose to use SmartThings over another platform now that Matter is making compatibility of devices less of an issue in the smart home. (SmartThings arguably built its brand on being the most open platform of the major players).

She also pointed to the SmartThings Home Life services, a new feature in the SmartThings app that groups smart home functions into energy management, cooking, pet care, and air quality to provide actionable advice and control. Currently, these services only work with Samsung devices (except for energy management, which can monitor the energy use of all devices connected to SmartThings). But Jung says, with Matter, Samsung plans to support more devices in these services. “We seek to become an open platform so people can benefit from using SmartThings with all the smart devices they have in their home,” she says.

However, by not enabling the bridge function in its hubs, Samsung’s claim of pursuing platform openness with SmartThings rings just a little hollow. It’s the only platform of the big four that supports both Zigbee and Z-Wave devices, and many devices in the first Matter categories — lights, locks, sensors — use Zigbee and Z-Wave protocols. This meant Samsung had a unique opportunity it didn’t take. It could have been the first platform to bring Zigbee and Z-Wave devices into Matter, allowing all Matter-enabled platforms to control any compatible devices connected to its hub. Instead, SmartThings hubs and dongle will be the first way to get Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter all in the same ecosystem — but it will have to be SmartThings’ ecosystem.

UPDATE, Friday, October 14, 4:05 PM: Samsung reached out to clarify that the SmartThings dongle is not yet Matter certified. We have updated some language in the article to reflect this.

Samsung introduced its first standalone SmartThings smart home controller at its CES 2022 keynote this week. The Samsung Home Hub is designed to be a central place for a household to control and monitor their smart home without having to buy a $4,000 smart fridge.

Samsung says at launch, the Home Hub will “be able to connect to every product within the SmartThings ecosystem,” with integrations for other devices, such as lights and door locks coming soon. There was no specific mention of this being a SmartThings software hub itself (Samsung has said it is integrating SmartThings hub software into many of its smart appliances), but it’s hard to imagine it won’t be. There’s no pricing available or a US release date, but it is scheduled to launch in Korea in March and globally after that.

There have been a few attempts at solving this problem — the touchscreen Brilliant Control Panel that replaces your existing light switches is an innovative solution that takes advantage of a house’s existing wiring. But installing that system in every room will set you back a pretty penny, and the screen is much smaller than a tablet, making it less intuitive for all users.

I’ve used the Samsung Family Hub smart fridge, and the Home Hub interface looks similar. Both largely resemble a blown-up version of Samsung’s SmartThings smartphone app. There’s a Favorites home screen with your favorite devices on it, a Devices tab for all your gadgets, and a Life tab where you’ll find Samsung’s connected services — such as Cooking, Clothing Care, Energy, Pet, Air and Home Care Wizard. That last one monitors your Samsung smart appliances and tells you when you need a new water filter for your fridge, as well as offers troubleshooting tips when needed.

Speaking of Samsung’s connected services, the SmartThings Energy service, which monitors the power usage of all compatible connected devices and recommends ways for you to save energy based on usage patterns, is being expanded to include more products and services. Samsung also announced partnerships earlier this year that enable real-time monitoring of whole-home energy consumption in the SmartThings App. This type of integration should allow homeowners to set up automations based on energy costs or demand response events.

Samsung is also part of Matter, a new smart home standard with similar goals. How this initiative will fit in with Matter is unclear at this stage. Matter is a local protocol, with devices communicating primarily over a local network while still allowing IP access to connect to the internet. This new Alliance appears to be focused on expanding connectivity between cloud-based services. This is something Samsung has been pursuing more aggressively since it started to transition its SmartThings platform from a hardware-based smart home hub to a software-based service.

Suddenly, SmartThings looks like the most comprehensive smart home platform, at least at a glance. Both Google and Amazon are rapidly expanding the number of first-party devices that work with their Alexa and Google Assistant services, but neither has their own TV or refrigerator yet, outside of products from other manufacturers. Samsung SmartThings has both of those things, as well as

It"s been awhile since we took a close look at SmartThings, so I decided to spend some time with it -- on my phone, and in the Samsung fridge and television installed in the CNET Smart Home. What is it like to have a home wholly operated by SmartThings (and Samsung) in 2019, you ask? Spoiler alert: not great. Read on to find out why.

SmartThings pressed on. There"s still a SmartThings hub (now third-gen) and an updated app. And SmartThings still has an open platform with tons of compatible third-party partners

It was almost as if no time had passed, and I don"t mean that in a good way. SmartThings gave me a lot of trouble in 2015 when I tested the second-generation hub, along with tons of SmartThings sensors and third-party devices.

But knowing how much SmartThings has grown over the years, it felt only fair to see if it had also matured into the platform I"ve always wanted it to be. Unfortunately, SmartThings was as temperamental as ever, just on a larger scale.

There are also a variety of devices installed at the CNET Smart Home that are compatible with the SmartThings platform and already paired to it on the app.

Let"s move on to the specifics of testing out SmartThings on the app, the fridge and on the TV.The updated app is my preferred way to interact with SmartThings -- although it"s still glitchy and tough to navigate.Tyler Lizenby/CNET

All that said, the app -- even with the latest app version -- crashed inexplicably at least four to six times during my testing. It still takes a lot of clicks and different screens to reach the settings you want and it"s easier to view the Arlo Pro 2 live feed in the Arlo app than on the SmartThings app.

The SmartThings connection on the Family Hub fridge performed significantly worse than the app. The fridge itself is a solid product with tons of apps and clever features.

SmartThings was another story. I connected the exact same SmartThings account on my app to the fridge. Instead of getting a list of all of the connected devices like the Play Light Bar and the Pro 2 camera, I got... crickets. It didn"t list a single device.

The fridge"s giant built-in LCD screen instead said, "After you connect devices in the SmartThings app on your phone, you"ll be able to monitor and control them on your Family Hub." Hrm.Where are all of my SmartThings devices? Who knows.Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The Q6 Series TV fortunately worked better than the fridge. Login via the SmartThings app on the TVs home screen and use the Samsung TV remote to scroll through -- and control -- your SmartThings devices. I was able to turn my Philips Hue light bar on and view my Arlo Pro 2 camera.Viewing the Arlo Pro 2 camera connected through SmartThings on the TV screen.Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Annoyingly, my SmartThings devices didn"t always show up when I opened the TV app. I"d log out and back in and they"d usually appear, but once or twice I had to log out twice before they loaded.

While SmartThings has clearly grown up, I still wouldn"t recommend it as a whole-home setup today. I experienced similar glitches in 2015 as I did testing the updated system in 2019. The app crashes, for instance, shouldn"t still be happening.

There"s also a question of value. If you want SmartThings in your home today in a major way, you"ll have to dish out thousands of dollars for a Samsung fridge and TV -- and that doesn"t include the other investments in third-party devices like lights and cameras.

Relatedly, even if the fridge integration had worked better, I wouldn"t ever think to head over to the fridge to turn on a light or adjust my SmartThings settings.

The idea of the fridge as the "hub of the home" makes sense in many ways -- I particularly enjoyed the TV mirroring feature, but I don"t want (or need) my fridge to be an access point with all of my smart home devices. I do like the idea of being able to view a security camera feed on the fridge, but, again, that specific SmartThings integration didn"t work for me.

That feeling isn"t specific to Samsung, SmartThings or Bixby. I wouldn"t want an Alexa-, Google Assistant- or Siri-platform-enabled LCD fridge display either. Voice sans screens is the simplest way for a whole family to interact with smart home devices -- no phone, no fridge, no TV needed.

It will be interesting to see if and how the Galaxy Home changes things for Samsung and SmartThings. Samsung is way behind the voice assistant curve, which seriously hurts its appeal today.  But once the smart speaker hits stores, I have to ask -- what"s the point of the SmartThings hub? Does the Galaxy Home even need a SmartThings hub?

All of this speaks to the diminished role of hubs in homes -- I feel similarly about Wink. Samsung"s clunky execution of SmartThings hasn"t helped things either.

This certainly sounds like it could make Bixby better, but that won"t mean much if I can"t manage to connect my SmartThings devices to the fridge. We"ll see.

$ smartthings devicepreferences:update -i dp.json # update a device preference with data from dp.json, select which preference from a list

Debug logging can be enabled via the SMARTTHINGS_DEBUG environment variable. This will log at debug level to the console as well as the default log file.

Since I originally published this article, I’ve switched from using SmartThings to using HomeAssistant & stopped using ActionTiles. While I’m leaving this post up, I don’t have much experience troubleshooting this setup, so while I’d like to help, you’re probably best to ask someone else questions about this setup.

I recently replaced my traditional home security system with a more modern setup. The old system was your typical box with multiple wired sensors hooked up to doors, windows, motion detectors & smoke/carbon monoxide detectors. The new setup takes all these existing sensors and exposes them as things in SmartThings where you can use the SmartThings

To interact with the old security system, you typically use bulky keypads with the back-lit LCD screen. These won’t work for the new setup… I wanted something much more modern. The solution: smart touchscreens!

This panel is actually much bigger… I can stroll down to control our smart thermostats, view the cameras we have on our house and a lot more. Some of the tiles are interactive while others aren’t. For instance, the sensors from the old security system aren’t interactive such as doors, windows & motion detectors.

ActionTiles rocks as I can configure panels as much as I like in a browser experience from my desk and wherever they are being consumed, they automatically get updated.

We like it so much, we’re considering getting the larger 10" Kindle Fire for the kitchen. That one’s ActionTiles panel will use a larger tile theme to see it from across the room. It’s also great for displaying recipes via the Plan to Eat app we use for meal planning.

The existing security system had a wire that ran to the main security system. This wire provided 12V power & data to the keypad. Because the Kindle tablets are using my existing wireless network to show the ActionTiles panel, I only needed to supply power, but just 5V of power.

One thing I want to call out though was that I added a SmartThings plug that cycles power on/off every few hours to the tablets. Driving constant power for an extended period of time to a tablet isn’t safe as the batteries aren’t designed for that. This way, the tablets charge for 3 hours, then run off battery discharging themselves for 3 hours which is more what they were designed to do.

It’s the end of an era for LCD panels, or at least for those manufactured by Samsung. The Korean firm has been teasing the end of its LCD manufacturing for years, but now, the deadline is about to be reached. From June 2022, Samsung Display will no longer produce liquid-crystal displays (LCD). This does not mean that the end of LCD panels in smartphones, computers, and other electronics. It’s just Samsung leaving the segment due to tough competition from its Chinese and Taiwanese counterparts.

Instead of keeping a tepid LCD business, the company will shift efforts to OLED (organic light-emitting diode) and QD displays. The OLED panels have become the “best” for the smartphone market. There is still a predominance of LCD screens, but most of the flagship, premium mid-range, and even conventional smartphones are getting OLED displays nowadays. LCDsare still very popular in the segment of PCs and laptops, however.

According to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), the average price index of LCD panels, measured against 100 in January 2014, will fall to 36.6 in September of this year. The figure has dropped farther from the record low of 41.5 in April of this year. It’s also 58 percent lower than the record high of 87 in June 2021.

Unfortunately, no investment plan details have since been announced. However, the employees of the LCD business should retain their jobs. The company will likely move them to the Quantum Dot Display business. Worth noting, that Samsung has been trying to leave the LCD segment since 2020. The initial plan was to close the business at the end of 2020. However, these plays have been delayed by Samsung Electronics. The sudden increase in the prices of the LCD panels during the COVID-19 pandemic urged Samsung Display to keep the manufacturing for a while. This resulted in an entire 2021 of continuous manufacturing. Now, however, the business seems to have reached the deadline.

The display affiliate was first formed in 1991, as an LCD business arm under Samsung Electronics. It formally launched in 2021, as Samsung Display. It has merged with three local and Japanese makers of active-matrix organic light-emitting diodes (AMOLED), for the production of advanced types of displays. The company will no longer produce the panels for Samsung TVs which will likely push forward the portfolio of QD and OLED smart TVs.

The mid-range segment of smartphones may not suffer a big impact. After all, there are countless LCD makers still operating in the industry. As far as the mobile segment is concerned, the company is doing a good job. The Galaxy S22 series is successful in China, and the company is preparing the terrain for the Galaxy Z Fold 4. The flagships and the foldable offer the best Samsung has been developing in display tech.

By combining compatible or interoperable home automationdevices with theSmartThingsController, you will experience a smart home that is reliable, stable and capable of meeting all your needs.

When paired with Aeotec Smart Home Hub and the SmartThings software that the hub uses, Water Sensor 7 (Basic) user guideorWater Sensor 7 Pro user guide will offer the following features:

2. Water Sensor 7 showing up as a generic device?Check if SmartThings picked up all of the correct information, follow the below steps to check:Click on "My Locations", then select the locationof your hub.

Along with Google Assistant, SHIELD TV integrates the Samsung SmartThings Hub as part of its Home AI services*.  By attaching a SmartThings Link, SHIELD becomes a fully features SmartThings Hub.

In order to connect to Zigbee or Z-Wave devices, a SmartThings Link must be connected to SHIELD.  SmartThings Link devices can be purchased directly from SmartThings at this link.