Way back in the early 2020s, smart device manufacturer wemo their brand new multi-button wireless device, the Stage Scene Controller. Soon after this CES2020 unveiling, however, COVID took hold, and inevitably this product, along with many others, were postponed.About a year later, and an FCC filing spotted by Dave Zatz showed an update on the details of the product. What most people didn't notice at the time was that the Wemo Stage, although ostensibly a Bluetooth device, actually used a Thread-capable chip;

• NXP BLE IC: K32W061 ( Bluetooth 5.0, Zigbee 3.0, Wire networking)

. The final release of the product took place in late April 2021, with the Wemo website statingThread ready' as part of the specs for this product. Since then, Wemo has been pretty non-committal 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 function [sic] for the Wemo WSC010 will be available sometime next month (January 2022).

While a delay of about 9-10 months is not uncommon these days, the news that Thread will be coming to the Wemo is great news for anyone who bought this product when it first came out - including myself.

The story gets even more complicated, because another application on the FCC.io website has a different not-yet-released Wemo Stage Controller, and although the model (WSC010) is the same, the registration and FCC ID are different - the original is registered as K7S-WSC010, while the newer model is listed as K7S-08346. The new list also explicitly mentions Wire and Bluetooth test reports (the original model entry does not).

Could this just be the same product with a few internal improvements not possible for the original? Very likely. If Wemo were to release an updated model with Thread and leave the original model "in the coldThis could cause a lot of displeasure among consumers who stepped into the "Thread ready" bullet point, so it would be unlikely that Wemo would do such a thing, especially based on Wemo's aforementioned statement, which only talks about the original model getting an update, and nothing about a newer model.