Sorry if this topic has been made before, I searched the forums but I didn’t find anything as extensive as what I was looking for.
I have been using the Abode integration for HA for a few months, but have had a Homekit controller device starting with “HSGW” in my available integrations for some time now. Not knowing what it was, I left it there for a while and finally started to look into it this morning. I finally discovered it was my Abode gateway, and connected to it, but I have some questions about connecting to Abode this way:
1. Is it local?
My understanding of Abode is that it can only be accessed via cloud, but my understanding of the Homekit controller is that it’s local. I unplugged my router from the internet and saw that it took longer for the Homekit-connected version to say “unavailable” than it did for the Abode integration, which I’m pretty sure is cloud-based. But eventually, the Homekit-connection went to unavailable as well. Here it is, side by side:
This is the same device, a window, with the one on top being connected via the Abode integration, and the one on the bottom being connected through the Homekit controller. You can see that the Homekit controller one was connected even after the Abode integration version went unavailable and it showed even when the window opened and closed, but it took a while to update that state, and then then it too went unavailable.
So it seems that, for a time at least, the Gateway was sending information to HA locally, but that it took longer to send that information, and then eventually went unavailable. When I reconnected the Gateway to the internet, I then looked at response times and they seem equal. If it were local, I’d think it would be a bit snappier, but maybe it was just fast. So I’m pretty confused here.
I’d obviously prefer local connection, that way my motion sensor-paired lights don’t stop working whenever I lose internet connectivity.
2. Where are all of the attributes?
I tried to upload a photo, but am a new user and can only upload one so far, but basically, the version of the window connected through Homekit doesn’t have all of the attributes that the Abode integration has, including “battery_low: bool”, which would be really nice to have. Any way to get these in there?
The other attributes not listed are “device_id: text”, “no_response: bool”, “device_type: text”, and “attribution: text”
3. Which would you suggest?
Is there anyone using Abode who has made this decision? Which way did you decide to connect, and why?