So having finally received my SmartThings hub and a few devices, I’ve spent the past week learning how to program it to interface with my existing Particle.io Photon controllers running Patriot. It turns out that SmartThings has a fairly nice architecture that made automatically discovering my existing devices fairly easy. I needed to write a Service Manager SmartApp and a child Device Handler. Altogether this was about 200 lines of Groovy code (basically Java). The service manage interacts with Particle.io to locate each Photon controller on my account, and then ask it what devices it supports. It then creates a child device for each using the name exposed by the Photon. Voila!
This is essentially the same approach used by the Patriot Alexa Smart Home controller that I published for Alexa.
So yesterday when I finally got the kinks worked out, I reinstalled the Patriot Service Manager SmartApp that I’d written, and it automatically discovered my two dozen Patriot lights and added them to SmartThings. Woohoo!
So now I just need to explore the Alexa implementation on SmartThings and see if my Alexa Smart Home skill is still needed. At this point it looks like it can be completely replaced by the SmartThings Alexa support.