I’ve tried both Samsung HUB and Hubitat and now will I give Home Assistant a try
I am by nature a lazy guy so I reach to the community to get some advice to avoid common pitfalls.
First, I would like to avoid any dependencys to the cloud! ( HA seem to check that box)
Mainly I am trying to control lightning in my house. I have a combination of smart bulbs and switches for that purpose. I tend to prefer smart bulbs if there are a choice.
Switches mounted on the walls are a problem. I have a bunch of them but no one is accepted by wife!!! She tends to press multiple times because the feedback from the switch is not as expected and there are a delay between press an “action”. Result in on/off anger.
Searching for the smartphone before turning on the light in living room is not acceptable.
This is very much it.
Controlling lighthing in house without beeing sent out to sleep on the sofa.
So, discussion is open. KISS is a principle I very much favour,
Last remark, I live in Sweden and if equippment is availble in shops nearby, is a plus. Waiting 6 weeks to get stuff from china is not my thing.
To make your wife happy you should read about bindings.
You can bind a switch to a light (or group of lights) so that when it is operated the switch commands the light directly. This is a lot faster than going via Home Assistant. The other advantage of bindings is that your switches can still control the lights if Home Assistant is offline.
You can still control the lights from Home Assistant. There are two main methods for connecting to Zigbee devices in Home Assistant, ZHA and Zigbee2mqtt.
ZHA is part of Home Assistant and is a lot easier to set up, and it supports setting up bindings.
Zigbee2mqtt is a little more involved to set up (you need to set up an mqtt server as well) but has the advantage that your Zigbee network does not have to reinitialise every time you restart Home Assistant. This also supports setting up bindings.
Sure but that’s a native Zigbee capability (i.e. Don’t need SmartThings, Hubitat, or Home Assistant to do that). But if the light is bound to Hubitat or Home Assistant, there’s likely to be no performance difference (both act as non-cloud-dependent Zigbee coordinators).
The user has hopped from Samsung SmartThings to Hubitat to Home Assistant in an apparent attempt to get better performance from his Zigbee switches. Something is wrong here because even the first two platforms should have provided near instantaneous response, certainly the second one because it runs completely locally like Home Assistant.
Maybe I did not express myself clear enough. I never meant to claim that poor performance is the only reason to switch from Samsung/Hubitat.
Samsung.
Localy handled devices have acceptable performanc. As soon you use other users “add ons” the performace drops because a back and forth trip to Samsung servers. I’ve noticed that some users waitng for Samsung to change this and run everything locally.
Hubitat.
Performance is as above. No cloud is used. I run into problems with my IKEA switches. They simple dont work and according to their community forums, they never will work as long as Hubitat not are rewriting alot.
So, I have my reason for trying out HA but one of the biggest onstacles are user experience.
Thanks for clarifying the reason you have switched platforms.
Xiaomi’s devices don’t always follow standard Zigbee practices and that’s what makes them potentially problematic. I believe both the ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT integrations accomodate Xiaomi’s “quirks” but you will only know for sure when you try.
What about wifi devices. ( I can change bulbs ). There is a lot of Wifi devices comming out on the market. Shelly, D-link, Nedis, etc ( a lot of local brands that I think originally is from China with a new name)
I’m not sure why you would want to switch from one wireless technology (dedicated to IoT devices; mesh topology to support distant devices) to another wireless technology (not dedicated to IoT; hub-and-spoke topology so coverage may be an issue for distant devices).
FWIW, I use both Zigbee and WiFi devices (and other technologies), choosing the most suitable device for the task.
Why not simply install smart, in-wall switches and dimmers, and use non-smart bulbs in the fixtures? This provides the best manual control of the lighting loads - which leads to a happy wife/family/guests. It also provides a very nice way to implement automation via ST/Hubitat/HomeAssistant. The only thing you really lose is color bulb capability. This is a reasonable tradeoff in my home, to keep everyone happy and to have reliable, fast lighting.
That is actually a good idea , although , once upon a time I had problems matching wall dimmers and Led Bulbs. Some dimmers worked with some bulbs.
This is long ago so maybe it is easier to find working combinations today.
But it will also will solve some the feedback problem, using the wall switch with a invall smart unit behind it.
