Centralite 4256050-ZHAC Outlet and SmartThings 1

.Well, this is not related to Hyperion, now you might think that I’ve done that before too when I wrote about Mondrian. However, in that case, I could still tie it to the EPM world, this one not at all 😉

When we moved into the new home (oh I forgot we moved to South Carolina), I just started looking at Home Automation.(maybe went crazy 😉 )

I had a couple of smart outlets from Centralite (came with Xfinity security), and they use Zigbee protocol to connect to Xfinity system. I no longer have Xfinity, and I thought why not use these with SmartThings.

If you are someone who is trying to get these connected, you’ll notice that SmartThings won’t recognize these outlets as “Outlets,” it just identifies the outlet as a “Thing”. I started looking at the SmartThings community and found this thread, which details about adding a device handler and perform some custom coding.

I looked at the code and found that it is using Groovy 🙂 🙂 and thought ok, I can do this.

First of all, I didn’t like that an outlet was getting added as a power dimmer, so I wanted it to get recognized as an outlet itself.

You know, I just wanted the outlet to behave like what it is, not as something else so that I can make it working 😉 (Know who you are sort of a thing)

You’ll need a developer account to create a new device handler, once you are in developer account.

Go to “My Locations”->Home (or name of your hub)

Then Navigate to “My Device Handlers”

You can add a new device handler from here.

You can create a Device Handler from 4 different options, choose from Template. Look for a template called SmartPower Outlet.

Copy the code into a text Editor, I use Notepad++

You need to get some information from the Power Outlet that you added.oh if you didn’t add the outlet to SmartThings hub, please go ahead and do that now

Oh, if you didn’t add the outlet to SmartThings hub, please go ahead and do that now. Press the reset button while plugging in and use “Add a Thing” in the app.

Once it gets added, we need some information from “My Devices” tab.

That is my device, you can see the manufacturer, raw description, and endpointid from here.

You need the highlighted raw description and manufacturer information. Let’s edit that in Notepad++.

Line 18, I changed my Device Handler name to CentraLite HA 1.1 Outlet (you can change the author name if you wish)

Line 30 is the Offical CentraLite model, I duplicated that line and added my model number and raw description so that it’s looks like the one below.

fingerprint profileId: "0104", inClusters: "0000,0003,0004,0005,0006,0B04,0B05", outClusters: "0019", manufacturer: "CentraLite", model: "4256050-RZHAC", deviceJoinName: "Outlet"

That’s all, one line of code.

Copy the full contents and go back to SmartThings developer paste the contents and click Publish For me

If all goes well you should see a new device handler.

All you’ve to now do is to edit the device and attach this new device handler to it.

That’s all. I can now control my Smart Outlet using SmartThings app.

Yup it does show the energy usage 🙂