Wifi switches with new hub

I am brand new to this smart home hub equipment. I just purchased the ezlo secure because of the ability to communicate with 2GIG equipment.

I recently installed about 30 wifi dimmers, switches and ceiling fan controllers. Most are from tessan. One from Leviton and one from wemo. I just purchased my first z-wave 3-way switch. I have all of the tessan wifi switches paired in the Smart Life app. They work great… so far. The Leviton and wemo switches are paired in their respective apps.

When I researched about all the various hubs wifi and Bluetooth were common amongst them. So how do I pair all of my switches within the ezlo secure hub. I plan on doing a significant amount more of these smart devices and I want them all accessible in the hub so I don’t have to jump back and forth from app to app and creating scenes and automations will be all within the hub and not so much within the individual apps.

I have a lot to learn. But, this is necessary to integrate everything locally.

Thank you,

Kevin

Hello @Kevin_Simnick,
To add a Z-Wave device, please check How to add Generic Z-wave/Zigbee Devices to my Ezlo Controller?
The Wi-Fi devices can be controlled using Ezlo VOI and you can program action by using scenes. Find more info at How to get started with Ezlo VOI™.
Kind regards!

VOI is currently broken, at least for me, the previously linked Google Home and Alexa accounts vanished from my Android Vera mobile app in the “Ezlo VOI” section and when trying to go through the process of linking the accounts again it says they have been linked but they do not then appear in the app GUI.

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If I want each wifi device to show up in the hub do I have to create a virtual device for each one?

Yes you would.

I am not familiar with WIFI devices from Tessan, however most hubs on the marketplace do not
natively directly support WIFI IOT devices as there is no standard comms protocol, all these WIFI IOT device manufacturers tend to have their own proprietary comms, therefore developers and users create their own plugins.

On the old Vera hubs some 3rd party developers created various plugins to work with various different WIFI IOT devices via their local or cloud APIs.

On the Ezlo hubs I think their game plan is to use something called VOI. The idea is that if your voice assistant Google Home or Alexa supports and can control that WIFI device, then you can add a “virtual” VOI device on the Ezlo hub and have some basic controls over the WIFI device like ON / OFF / DIM etc maybe other types of controls as well.

So when you create your VOI virtual device on the Ezlo hub you specify it to send a text command to the voice assistant for ON and a different text command for OFF etc.

Its then actually the voice assistant that controls the WIFI device, all the Ezlo VOI virtual device does is send the text command to the voice assistant to operate the device, just the same as if you had yourself spoken a command to the voice assistant to control a particular device etc.

Ezlo have recently released a new plugin framework for developers so over time plugins may be written for various WIFI devices but I wouldn’t count on it just yet until it gains some traction.

Thats not a correct statement.
Ezlo hubs do have native WiFi capability.
for each device a plugin must be written…because there is no standards (like command classes) on the commands like Zwave and Zigbee has…

Yes correction, the Ezlo and Vera hubs do have WIFI radios in the them for connecting to an access point and also a RJ45 Ethernet socket.

But a plugin would be needed for the Ezlo device to talk to a WIFI IOT device like a dimmer and for the particular types of commands that WIFI device is expecting to receive.

If your WIFI IOT devices support a HTTP API, then it may also be possible to just send HTTP commands from the Ezlo hub (virtual devices) to the WIFI IOT device for direct control cutting out the need for VOI and the Voice Assistant middle-man route etc.

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Ok. Thank you for the information. So next, what is a good source of information to start learning how to do plug-ins and coding. Like I said, this is brand new stuff to me. I’m not computer illiterate by any means. I just need to learn how to do it.

I see a lot of you rattle off all the terms and abbreviations, but most of it is a foreign language.

I appreciate the help and still need plenty more.

Hi @Kevin_Simnick , we just published initial version for developer documentation on plugins.

Please have a look and you can get familiar with LUA language for start using our API docs and examples. There you would see a http protocol plugin you can start with. After that we would be happy to guide you on how to proceed further.

thanks

Thank you so much. I will get right on this. Thank you to all who responded.

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