Link Samsung SmartThings to Home Assistant

As we all know Samsung is a huge company offering an extremely broad range of products and devices. Samsung has developed its own automation hub that is compatible with a vast array of 3rd party products. Generally devices connect via Zigbee or Z-Wave, more recently, Samsung have confirmed that Matter devices will connect to SmartThings of you operate a v2 or v3 SmartThings Hub.

SmartThings is often a first step into Home Automation for many owing to its large reach and branding popularity. If you have gone passed the point of dipping your tow into the Home Automation scene you have probably landed at Home Assistant. Fortunately both these systems can communicate through each other allowing you to bring your SmartThings world into Home Assistant. So lets see how that’s done.

A pre-requisite of this integration is that you have enabled external access to your Home Assistant instance. If you have not done this please use this guide to do this.

  1. First up, we need to generate a token from SmartThings. Head over to https://account.smartthings.com/tokens and log in with your Samsung account. You should see a screen similar to the below. I already have a ‘Home Assistant’ token generated for my existing integration. To generate a new token, click ‘Generate New Token’ button.

2. Name you Token and select the access permissions.

There is a long list of access permissions you will need to scroll down to see them all. Please take time to think about what you actually want to do. For my purposes I just check them all – I have no need to exclude anything – you might not realise now what you’ll want to do in future.

Once all are checked click Generate Token.

3. Copy and take note of the token!

As the message you are prompted with states, this will be the only time you will see the token. Copy it and save it somewhere so you don’t have to repeat the token generation process.

4. Add the Integration from Home Assistant.

In Home Assistant go to Settings > Devices & Services and then Click Add Integration.

Type smartthings and you should see the below. Click the SmartThings integration

Click Submit to the message to ‘Confirm the Callback URL’ unless its obvious it is wrong.

Enter The Access Token you generated from your Samsung account earlier.

This will not work if you have not already configured external access. To do this please see this guide for enabling.

The Select the Location. This will likely be whatever is defaulted. Click Submit.

A new web browser window will now open. Enter an appropriate name and click done at the bottom of the screen. The ‘Done’ button is not obvious. see below.

Click ‘allow’ on the next screen.

You will now see a screen telling you how successful this was (hopefully!).

Close that screen and go back to your Home Assistant window. You will now see something similar to the below. It’s a list of all your SmartThings devices that are now available to Home Assistant. Spend some time to configure the Area detail if you like. Once complete, click Finish.

Once you get familiar with Home Assistant you will likely get to the point where you don’t need SmartThings and you can port everything across and into Home Assistant directly. However, there is one key part of SmartThings that make it still very relevant for me. If you notice above I have listed a few devices named virtual switches. Samsung SmartThings allows virtual devices that can operate as if they were physical. SmartThings can also be added to Amazon Alexa devices as a skill. This means that through SmartThings; Home Assistant can take advantage of Alexa voice commands for free. Simply create a virtual switch in SmartThings and use the virtual switch in an Alexa voice command routine while also using that same switch as an automation trigger in Home Assistant. I use this for all sorts and it works great. It is the one reason why I shall be using SmartThings alongside Home Assistant for a while yet.

If you would like to know how to create a virtual switch in SmartThings, please see this guide.

Any queries or questions, please comment below.

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