After approximately 2 1/2 months with Home Assistant, I’ve decided to stick with HS3 for now. I need a system that allows me the flexibility to do what I need, which HA does a great job of, but I also need a system that doesn’t break when an update is applied. That’s been my experience over the last 2+ months. I’ve had several cases of OS updates just not updating as well as the system just “breaking” after a HASS update, even when the things that break aren’t listed in “breaking changes”. Luckily I’m running in a VM, so I can restart from a VM snapshot and keep running.
I won’t say I won’t try again in the future, but for now I need rock solid reliability and I can get that with HS3. We’ll see what HA (and HS4) bring down the road.
I have probably the same amount of time with Home Assistant but have come to a different conclusion. I am almost fully migrated over to Home Assistant and plan on retiring my HS3. I do have licenses for HS4 but they won’t now be used.
I have had the same experiences with Home Assistant but I believe the long term future development is worth sticking with it. I have had the same downtime with Home Assistant upgrades. A few weeks ago all my panels were broken due to the most recent upgrade. But… a few days later after all the HACS developers jumped on it everything was resolved.
When I look at these Home Assistant forums compared to the HomeSeer ones it is very different. Home Assistant has plenty of new development, ideas and integrations. HomeSeer to me at least is a dead end.
Home Assistant: Excellent community support. Bullet proof automation engine. I hate that my Z-Wave takes 15 minutes to come up after a restart. I hate that I have to restart to apply anything of significance in the configuration. Z-Wave is not that great but I have found workarounds for all of my devices to get them working. I have made beautiful panel screens with the Lovelace ui based on this A different take on designing a Lovelace UI I am planning on looking at a 3D panel view like this but for right now I just had to have minimum viable panels 3D Floorplan using lovelace picture-elements card What used to take forever in HSTouch Designer is now really quick in Home Assistant. In HSTouch I had to make buttons in an image editor for everything at all different resolutions for each tablet size. With Home Assistant everything is generated on the fly on each panel and all the dimensions are percentages of display resolution. This means one panel configuration supports many devices. As an example of this I have one panel configuration being used on Amazon Fire 8 tablets, iPad Pro and a Windows 10 tablet.
HomeSeer: Z-Wave excellent support. Bullet proof event engine. HSTouch no support in years and HSTouch Designer is a real clunker. Private company. HS4 appears like the answer to a problem I don’t have (mobile admin interface).
After further discussion with my wife over a glass of wine (actually two) I’ve decided to continue running HA but with a different strategy. For now, all devices and events will remain active in HS3 with HA becoming the UI server as I develop replacements for my HSTouch screens. Next to automated lighting, this is probably the biggest impact on the family. The UI will be more of a learning/prototyping mechanism and training/proof-of-concept for my family rather than a finished product. The reason for this approach is because all of the data will be coming into HA via MQTT messages from HS3.
That is a good idea using Home Assistant as a ui server. You could use one of the MQTT HomeSeer plugins to get state over to Home Assistant for display.
As an example I had the following in my Home Assistant configuration /sensors/hs2hass_time_of_day.yaml (using split configuration)
I definitely don’t blindly update HA. I carefully read the blog posts, specifically breaking changes, and I also stay a release or so behind to see what others stunble upon. The biggest thing I’ve had was when the UI just never comes back after an update. Even after a full system restart from the command line, I can’t get a web interface. It’s as if the web server doesn’t get started. This has happened twice.
HA’s development pace is exactly why I plan to stick around and see where things go but also why I just can’t use it as my production control system right now.
Notice the title of this topic. I have no intention of moving to HS4.
Hello all from a new HA user! I made the plunge into HA a little more than 24 hours ago after using HS since ~2000. I have HA up and running on an HP Prodesk 600 under Debian 10. Moved my Insteon and Zigbee devices over to it and loving the new UI! Now working on Z-Wave and attempting HS3:HA integration via the mathoc/homeseer pyHS3 approach
My Z-wave is a RaZberry in a Pi3B+ that I’ve been using with HS3/4 via ser2net on the Pi. I will be looking at continuing to use is as a pseudo-Z-Net directly in HA via: RPi as Z-Wave/ZigBee-over-IP server for Hass…
Success! All of my HS4 Z-Wave devices and events have populated!
There was an error in my copy/paste/edit for new homeseer: section in configuration.yaml (a rogue \t snuck in somehow). After enabling ASCII commands in HS4, a restart is required to effect the change.
Welcome! I think a lot of people have made the move from HS4 to Home Assistant. Personally my HS3 machine is now turned off. I’ll keep it around for a while in case I need to refer back to it. So far so good on Home Assistant. HomeSeer HS3 served me well over the years but HS4 is the answer to a problem I didn’t have. I don’t believe HS4 will get the level of development that Home Assistant gets and frankly HS4 looks botched. I would not trust my production system to it.
My user base has now become accustomed to the new panels around the house.
@dbrunt - Welcome to the party. The pyhs3/homeseer component is s great way to go as long as all of your device types are supported. I added some sensor support to pyhs3 a while back. For those devices not supported, MQTT is another option.
I’m using the mcsMQTT plugin to push sensor data over to HA for my new UI design. Using the Mosquitto add-on in HA as the broker.
Sticking with HS3 for automation while using HA as the UI server seems to be working out well so far.
HS4 was just officially released the day after I decided to venture into HA! I’ve been doing their beta thing since March but got fed up with their Alexa integration still not working 100% and their Zigbee beta plugin’s limited device support (10 or 12 I think). I embarked upon mcsMQTT, mosquito and zigbee2mqtt for my foray into Zigbee devices but getting that set up was while a useful learning curve, extremely tedious. The pyhs/homeseer component is working for me. I just had to change my Z-Wave motion detectors device type string from Z-Wave Notification to Z-Wave Sensor Binary and they showed up in HA so I can use them to automate my Insteon switches and Zigbee lights. It took me a while to figure out the HA automation process to turn on/off an Insteon switch. I eventually determined they are only entities and do not exist as devices. I was quite perplexed as to how to use them in the automation UI until I found some yaml code that referenced them as an entity. I copied/pasted/modified code into yaml and then looked at the automation via the UI and now I see how to do it…
Funny, I just made the leap 2 days ago and am doing automations impossible in Homeseer. HS4 was super disappointing, way worse than HS3, super buggy and the most basic stuff was hard to do (even compared to HS3). I sunk a lot of money into HS over the years, but it is what it is. I retired Homeseer last night after transitioning everything I needed over to HA.
I have sunk a lot of money as well into HomeSeer. It is what it is. I was happy to pay it at the time as I thought I was getting a well supported product.
I can’t remember the last time HS3 was upgraded let alone HSTouch Designer. When I used to call for some support I was directed to use the community forums.
Here on Home Assistant there are new substantive releases every 3 weeks. There is a sense of community and the Home Assistant integrations are far better supported than the paid HomeSeer plugins. I’m not sure now that the HomeSeer paid plugin model is sustainable. I really do appreciate the community in Home Assistant giving their time to improve it.
I might try HomeSeer HS4 as I do have it licensed. But then what is the point if everything is cut over to Home Assistant. My users are happy. My panels are massively more responsive than HomeSeer HSTouch / Designer.
Anyway. I think I just need to let it go. I was with HomeSeer for a long time and I think I’m disappointed that HS4 is a dead end in my opinion and not worth investing in.
This was pretty much the same situation I was in. I use a Z-Net which is basically a Pi with a Z-Wave module. Until it’s supported in HA I decided to keep my Z-Wave devices in HS3 and use MQTT for status updates to the HA UI.
HST has not had phone support for quite a while. Their email support has been really good for me. The forums are pretty good. Most PI developer support is pretty good; Wim (Jowi paid plugins) and Michael McSharry (mcsMQTT free) and Blade are extremely responsive, knowledgeable and helpful. I’ve been using HS4 beta for about 4 months and it just went GA. The forums are a buzz now of activity; mostly questions and answers that the beta testers already went through re HS3 to HS4 migration. Most have experienced a painless migration though. The new UI grid view is not up to snuff yet. The primary device displayed is not controllable like MyHS mobile. It picks whatever it wants… Notification child device over Lock/Unlock child, Battery over Motion status… You get the picture. I’ve never really used HStouch as I never really had a need for it.
I started with basic X10 and a CM something or other in the '80’s and then Homeseer in 2000 on Windows 2000. Then went through a home automation dry spell for a number of years but re-entered year before last. While it’s not essential for me, I love testing gadgets and figuring things out. My girlfriend still says Why not just get up and turn on the switch. My answer is What if I took your TV remote away and you had to go to the TV to change ANYTHING? No answer… LOL. BTW, her place now has B-hyve controlled drip Watering, automatic light and pump control on her 2 fountains, a Wifi wall switch for her bedroom Light, oh and Alexa! Last night I arrived with a Wiz light bulb for the reading light on the pole lamp in her bedroom. Of course she said Why do I need that? I installed it anyway. When we went to bed, she reached up to turn off the light which was at 100% daylight. I said wait a sec then Alexa, set the pole lamp to warm white, Alexa dim the pole lamp to 5%. 5 minutes later She said this is nice, I like it…
Next up for me is to add my new external Z-Wave antenna to my RaZberry and then see about connecting HA on HP running Buster to the RaZberry on the PI, then Alexa integration…
Here an automator since the late 1970’s using X10. First computer utilized for X10 automation was a Commodore 64 then a 128 then a Commodore Amiga computer. Got in to video stuff using a Video toaster sometime and helped one TV station here in the midwest move to the Amiga Toaster world. I did also purchase CPM computers and tinkered with them relating to accounting efforts. Had one of the first BBS’s here in the midwest running on a Commodore Pet computer with some 5-6 Ventel modems. I was in to phones at the time and “tapped” in to a local phone box to get my phone lines. Geez at the time it was so easy to take over trunk lines and do whatever you wanted with a phone line.
Got in to security at the end of the 1980’s with a first generation combination security automation panel with speech called the Excalibur.
In the 1990’s purchased X10 automation that ran on Windows 3.0 and 3.1 to Windows 98. In 1999 purchased first version of Homeseer which was not called Homeseer at the time rather it was called something else by a company called Keware. I was in to computers and Linux and Windows at the time. One of the first computers that ran Homeseer was a Seiko POS computer with a battery and many serial interfaces (I still have this computer some place here). I did also come form a Cabletron world in the late 1990’s (United Airlines was only using cabletron switches (thousands) back then domestically and internationally). Geez had an internet IP (there were no firewalls back then) on my office desktop and tested Homeseer to work from wherever I had travel
I still run Homeseer today. (now Homeseer 4 and 3). Switched to running Homeseer in Linux with very first RPi Homeseer. I did test it fine on Intel / AMD CPU based computers at the time and it worked great.
Running Homeseer and Home Assistant and Node Red and MQTT broker on a micro PC (also running Oracle VB’s of W7 embedded just for my SAPI voices) which integrates here to my Leviton OmniPro 2 panel (the panel like an old bakelite telephone).
Still running X10, UPB, ZWave and Zigbee here plus liking the firmware updating of WiFi devices.
Automation here is a hobby but not a necessity and I am not tethered to my cell phones. I enjoy using Home Asisstant and enjoy using Homeseer on the same computer and they do compliment each other.
Just wanting to mention here that I have not left Homeseer and concurrently using Home Asistant and a happy camper.
