TLDR: How can I migrate all my zwave appliances to HA? Can I just plug in the zwave dongle I used in Indigo?
HA has proved just too irresistible - I’m planning on moving from Indigo to HA. However, I have a large number of zwave devices that I currently switch from an Aeotec Zwave Stick Gen 5. My worry is that a lot of these zwave devices are hidden away in the ceiling, built into furniture etc. so pressing the pairing button will not be easy.
Is using these zwave devices as simple as plugging my old Aeotec stick into the machine that will run HA. Or will I have to undertake a whole new pairing process?
Any help much appreciated. I can’t wait to start experiencing HA goodness!
Welcome! You’ll find a lot of Indigo converts here, myself included. Matt and Jay are awesome but it’s just impossible for two people to keep up with the momentum that HA has these days.
I don’t use zwave so can’t help you with that, but Colorado 4wheeler (CO_4X4)is here as well and I think he has a decent zwave setup so perhaps he’ll chime in.
Thanks for the welcome Terry, that’s so kind of you!
I’ve used and loved Indigo for years and I feel kind of liking I’m leaving a loved one but I think as you say there’s just no way two people can match the output of thousands of open source contributors. There seem to be so many extra integrations etc added by the community that I can’t resist it any longer. My Indigo subscription is still active so I’ll keep supporting them for a bit longer yet but the quality of things like the dashboards, metrics etc seems streets ahead in HA.
I dabbled a bit in HA earlier and I must confess that I do worry a little that it doesn’t seem as stable as Indigo, maybe because of the very reason that there are less things being added to the Indigo codebase. Stability seems to be improving all the time and I’m going to start trying to run HA in parallel to Indigo in a HA Green just to dip my toes in the water.
I must confess the Zwave looks to be the most locked-in aspect of moving to HA. Hopefully @CO_4X4 does chime in. He was always a stellar contrbutor in Indigo so I’d love his perspective.
FWIW I haven’t had HA crash in a VERY long time where it wasn’t my fault for doing something dumb, or a hardware/power failure. I honestly can’t remember the last time it crashed for ‘no apparent reason’. My environment is mostly Tasmota and Esphome devices with a few Zigbee motion detectors. As a semi-rule my light switches and dimmers are Martin Jerry devices flashed with Tasmota and anything I make runs Esphome. There are ton of automations and about a dozen various add-ins running. I’m running HA in Proxmox on the 2012 Mac Mini that used to run Indigo and it’s rock solid.
Edit: I haven’t used Indigo in several years now, but I just canceled my up-to-date subscription this year. I wanted to continue to support them as long as I could because I really do like those dudes and wish the best for them.
That was ultimately what made my decision. Matt & Jay are nice guys but they can’t keep on top of emerging technologies the way HA can and, frankly, it was getting a bit pricey and I dare say greedy by the time I left.
They very much are. I miss some aspects of the Indigo dash and had created some insanely awesome themes for them, but HA is eons ahead in dashboards.
Thank you! I enjoyed helping to expand Indigo quite a bit, just as I enjoy helping HA users here as well. Z-Wave, for me, is rock solid. It was a bit iffy at first but you are joining when we’ve moved past the “bad Z-Wave days” of HA and into two systems that are highly stable, well maintained and very mature.
I also wish them both the best, and you held on to your sub far longer than I did. I had three subs with Indigo, although one was a courtesy sub given by Jay for ongoing development, and I timed my migration to HA just when my subs were coming up for renewal.
I’ve transferred ownership of most of my GIT repositories for Indigo to Jay over the past year or so, especially the HomeKit stuff that they really wanted to maintain. I miss the community there sometimes but the community here is amazing and the product is positively fantastic. Sure there are bugs, but every software has them and Indigo had some pretty big whoppers of bugs that took them a while to work out - it is a much faster turnaround here.