Hello,
I am just starting to setup Hubitat for a brand-new house. At my last house I happily left my SmartThings V2 hub and a couple of permanently attached switches/dimmers for the new owners to struggle with.
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Anyway, I am going to start installing 8 Zooz ZEN 76 switches and 2 ZEN 77 dimmers to establish the mesh and my automation routines. Later, whenever they get here, I have 14 Inovelli Red Dimmers to install next weekend. My NOOB question is do I have to download and attach the Device Driver for every instance of the device I am installing, i.e do I download and install 8 drivers for the ZEN 76 switches, or do I just download the driver once and use that for each of the switches?
When you attach a device a driver is usually assigned by a fingerprint. Sometimes the community built drivers have more options available and you can use those instead. Only one copy of a driver needs to be on the system and each device that requires it will use it.
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@rlithgow1 is correct. If for example you wanted to manually install a Community developed driver, you could copy the code for the driver, head into the Driver Code area of the HE hub and "create" a new driver there by pasting the code into the editor and hitting save. This stores the definition of the driver once, then, depending on the type of driver, from the Devices page create a virtual device and select the new driver. You could create any number of devices in this way, but only need to go through the steps for creating the driver once, if that makes sense.
There's a few nuances to this, some drivers are geared towards being used by an associated app where the app or another driver / device detects the presence of devices or services, so it's not always the same "create virtual device" example, but hopefully you get the gist.
There is also a more commonly used method for installing apps/drivers through a Community developed app called Hubitat Package Manager, which makes the process of installing code much easier.
Simon
Thanks. I have already installed the Hubitat Package Manager, so that looks like that might be the best approach.
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