Way back at the start of 2020, smart device manufacturer wemo touted their brand new wireless multi-button device, the Stage Scene Controller. Soon after this CES2020 unveiling, however, COVID took hold, and inevitably this product, along with many others, were delayed. around a year later, and an FCC filing spotted by Dave Zatz showed an update to the product’s details. What most people didn’t notice back then was that the Wemo Stage, although ostensibly a Bluetooth device, was actually using a Thread-capable chip;
NXP BLE IC: K32W061 ( Bluetooth 5.0, Zigbee 3.0, Thread networks)
. The final release of the product took place in late April of 2021, with the Wemo website stating ‘Thread Ready‘ as part of the specs for this product. Since then, Wemo has been fairly non-commital in terms of when Thread would actually be activated, until Reddit user u/maxprobably revealed to the r/HomeKit sub, that Wemo had stated…
Please be informed that the Firmware [sic] update to enable Thread support feature [sic] to the Wemo WSC010 will be availble sometime next month (January 2022).
Whilst a delay of around 9-10 months isn’t out of the ordinary these days, the news that Thread will come to the Wemo is great news for all of those that purchased this product when it first came out – myself included.
Still, the plot thickens, as another separate filing on the FCC.io website has turned up another as-yet-unreleased Wemo Stage Controller, and although the model (WSC010) is the same, the filing and the FCC ID are different – the original is registered as K7S-WSC010, whilst the new newer model is listed as K7S-08346. The new listing also explicitly mentions Thread and Bluetooth test reports (the original model listing doesn’t).
Could this just be the same product with a few internal fixes that aren’t possible for the original? Quite likely. If Wemo were to release an updated model with Thread and leave the original model ‘out in the cold’, this could cause a lot of ill will from those consumers who bought into the ‘Thread ready’ bullet point, so it would be unlikely Wemo would do such a thing, especially based on the aforementioned statement from Wemo, who only talk about the original model as getting an update, with nothing on a newer model.
If the original model gets the long-awaited Thread update, things will be good in the land of HomeKit, but it’ll be interesting to see what the newer model has in store, although as already mentioned, it uses the same model number, so at a guess, it may be that this one will get Matter support perhaps, with the original staying as HomeKit only. Who knows?
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