The end goal should be to eventually remove your SmartThings hub completely. I have tons of beginner guides on my site, but specifically in this post I have guides for moving a bunch of SmartThings-branded devices (motion sensors, buttons, door sensors, etc) here: https://smarthomepursuits.com/how-to-migrate-from-smartthings-to-home-assistant/
I started with an Rpi 3B+, and that has turned out to be far slower than I expected, especially when I was restarting HA. So I’ve made a backup, and made a Supervised installation with Debian underneath on a HP T630 Thin Client. It is far more faster and has 16GB of memory, plus an M2 SSD slot. Plus it is not actively cooled, so I don’t have to worry about noise neither.
For Zigbee, I started with a CC2531 dongle, but that has turned out to be too weak. I haven’t really had any problems, but once I started to move more devices I experienced some slow down on response times. So I upgraded to an Egony CC2652P dongle which does the job. I had some issues with that for a few days, due to some remnants in the memory of the device, but I reflashed and erased that part and now it works as expected.
@Nameless, look at the list on Z2M for the dongles, there are plenty good dongles and “gateways”, the market lately’s flooded with CC2652P solutions.
@ogiewon, I would disagree with you regarding the endurance cards. I do use them, but their wear capability was really designed for continuous recording of bigger chunks of data, not for small file access. I believe that makes a big difference. But I do use them in cameras and in one of my RPis as well. Failure of an SD cards is always imminent. It doesn’t mattet what kind of it, it is just the question when.
@NathanCu, talking about the 20’ ladder. I started to move my Zwave inwall relays to HA the other day. I removed the switch cover and switches from their place, and had to realise that 3 relays are not there where I expected (Roller shutter controllers), so I still have to pull out the ladder to climb up to the attic where they must have been installed (by me).
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Yes I had the same thing happen and had to upgrade it, and I don’t even have that many zigbee devices. The supported adapter list you mentioned - | Zigbee2MQTT has grown with new ones even from when I bought my new adapter a few months ago. I went with the first one listed that’s the Electrolama zig-a-zig-ah! (zzh!) and bought it from Tindie. There was a wait list, but it was shipped relatively quickly to me in the US from the UK. It appears in stock now, and Its made a huge difference and I would recommend it. It’s one of the CC2652P chips you mentioned and probably any of the devices that use that will be a huge improvement over the CC2531. The CC2531 specifically says “not recommended” now on the zigbee2mqtt website. Here’s the link to order one or check it out
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Honestly, No - I had managed to get most of my stuff to run locally before I moved to HA. 
I will say the stuff i do have running so far is much faster. (Except the blinds in the front of the house, which I suspect is a weak spot in my ZWave mesh…)
Right now I’m honestly still just dealing with the pain of moving at the moment. It takes time to move that many ‘things.’ So far, I’ve got about 95% of the hardware moved and I’ve started rebuilding the automations. I’ve still got at least a week of work before everything is back to ‘parity.’
Edit: Oh - and don’t need Alarmo - the DSC panel integration gave me everything I needed by default. I don’t need to overlay anything on top of it.
Someone recently pointed out some issues in the way zwavejs heals the zwave network and updates neighbors.
The full network 'heal" can actually temporarily make things worse. The network usually figures itself out in a couple days though. I’ve found healing individual nodes that are slow works better then healing the whole network
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A bit late in saying hi on this thread given I moved over to HA in August, but I made it… HI Y’ALL (not Texan but live in TX so I adopted their lingo) EX-ST USERS!! 
Good to see you here!
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I am just waiting for the moment when @JDRoberts will pop-in to this thread.
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One issue I had with ST, and/or ST forums, is that it was not geared to be too tech detailed. I struggled for years with excessive zwave traffic and related issues. After just a few months on HA I am learning WHY I was having those issues and WHAT I can do to mitigate them. I found some posts on here that were way more helpful than “you have too many devices” which pointed me in the right direction.
A couple critical things I learned:
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Better to go insecure than use S0 as the latter increases 2 to 3x the traffic.
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Get rid of all old zwave (non plus) devices as they will bring down the mesh network speed. If this is true, then I have one big issue… I have 3 non plus zwave locks that would require about $600 to replace. I am currently unemployed so not a good time to make the upgrade, and anyhow, I would either want a 700 series lock or a Matter lock… given how rarely those would get replaced. Neither exist as far as I know so… what do I do? Any suggestions?
The above is basic stuff but even ST themselves never suggested it as a mitigation strategy. All they told me was to tone down Zooz motion sensors, which I did, but my issues remained. Also, the funny thing is that I always started having issues with my mesh once I got to including my locks. Since I work my way from hub out, that usually happened at 40 or so devices. Perfect storm… # of devices and 3 ancient slow locks!
What brand/model of locks are these? I know with Kwikset locks, it is pretty trivial to replace the Z-wave module with a Zigbee version. I did this for my father’s Kwikset lock, and it works great now. The radio module literally just slides in/out. Maybe you could just get a new radio module, Z-Wave Plus or Zigbee, for your current locks. 
Kwikset did a very smart thing… unfortunately my 3 locks are all Schlage BE469. If Kwikset will keep making new radios for their existing locks then it may make sense to replace them with one of their models… I am not planning on replacing my locks as frequently as everything else.
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Great to see these improvements… 
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If I couldn’t bump key most Kwikset locks in less than 3 seconds, I might agree.
Alas this model seems to have a Zigbee 2.0 radio and it is not interchangeable…
If Yale would produce those locks with keyhole and keypad in one piece for euro type cylinders. You know the ones with deadbolt inside and the 9V battery backup options on the outer side bottom.
Europe is wild west from that perspective. Either Nuki, but they dropped the Zigbee support as I can recall. Or Gerda/Yale locks. All with the fitted inside part. Yale at least has the whole cylinder and motor part and you can buy it in bundles, but the keypad is a separate product and everything runs through a Wifi/Bluetooth bridge. (Unless you have those locks where you need to lift up the handle to lock it. That is a nonsense regarding smart locks, if the door is closed, but the handle hasn’t been lifted up before it cannot lock the door automatically. )
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Maybe I should ask on the ST forums but I am guessing that most of us in this thread have had this need so here it is:
How do I nuke any API / token authorizations between ST and other services? I nuked everything I could, yet my Harmony Remotes seem to keep pinging ST servers even though I find no trace of ST on the remotes and/or the Android App. I will see if the Windows Harmony app shows anything more however I recall that there was some place where you could kill off any authorizations issued int eh past…
Any suggestions?
Pi-Hole:
Small apps can continue to run in the Smartthings cloud, even if not visible in your Smartthings app. If you download the Smartthings CLI tool, you can check for these “ghost” programs still linked to your account and delete them. I posted about it here with link to get the cli tool.
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Hey guys didn’t know all of you where here! Happy new year 
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@Nameless had a post recently in one of the ST topics about Home Assistant vs SmartThings and mentioned some cloud issues on the HA side. I haven’t noticed anything, but I mostly use my phone and app to interact remote, not through Google Home, that has now its own issues. Or generally has its own issues.
So, I wanted to ask here what is that really about, because I cannot believe SmartThings cloud would have less issue.
Otherwise, I wanted to ping @iridris as well, as he seems to be joined the dark side as well.
Yep I’ve been using HA for almost a year now, I think. I’m still using SmartThings, and don’t plan on changing that any time soon. The SmartThings integration seems to be really well built (actually it looks like it is maintained by a ST employee ). The integration also appears to be fully up to date on all of SmartThings’ latest endeavours (meaning no groovy to be found).
SmartThings has been working great for me for Zigbee and Z-wave. I have all of my lighting automations and scenes in ST. And I’m very interested to see how Edge improves things even further. The downside of ST is that it seems to always be in a transition state. Migrating apps took forever, there was the platform change, now there’s the Edge migration. I kind of wish they would just rip the bandaid off for all the old stuff and get the migrations done with.
What I have moved over to HA are some of the more advanced/complicated things, or oddball integrations. All of my Google Home voice alerts are through HA, as are most of my push notifications (because no one else in the family really needs to get the notifications I care about). I am still using WebCore for one area (lock automation) but I’m planning on swinging that over to HA soon so that I can yank the plug on WebCore.
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