Brand new user. First post. Please help me understand what I need to migrate from Smartthings to Home Assistant. Not necessarily looking to get rid of Smartthings completely since I have over 200 devices setup on it and I am just used to it. I understand you can “bridge” HA and ST so I will be researching that option more.
I run smarthings on a large property that has five separate buildings on it. All of the buildings are on the same wifi, but they use their own smartthings hub, as they are too far away from each other to linkup the zwave devices over a single zwave network. So, we have a Smartthings hub in each building, for a total of five hubs.
As I said, currently running around 200 zwave devices and 18 nest smoke alarms between the five hubs/buildings. Everything works pretty smoothly but we have lots of issues with the forced-cloud requirements of Smartthings because we are in a rural area with a point-to-point Internet service that is not always reliable. So, HA is a very exciting option to me.
Now, my question is… how many HA hubs do I need to build to handle this situation? Do I just need one? Or do I need five? This is my main question that I need an answer to, so if someone could address this, it would be greatly appreciated!
Honestly, considering buying the " ODROID-N2+ Home Assistant Bundle". Since I run so many devices, I think it might be worth it. Also, I see that that it has a HDMI port. Can someone provide an example of what the HDMI could be used for on this? Very curious…
Do you run one z-wave network or multiple z-wave networks? I’m going to assume you have multiple networks, one in each building talking to each smartthings hub
If I were doing it, I would use one HASS instance on whatever hardware you’d like, with that many devices you won’t be sad to have extra processing pwoer. Then I would use a separate piece of hardware (you’ll also need a Z-wave usb stick) to run Zwavejs2mqtt for each zwave network you’re running (this would depend on your answer to the first question also). As long as the Zwavejs2mqtt hardware can all talk over a network you can consolidate them all into a single HASS instance if you’re use MQTT (I’m NOT sure this is true if you use the new gateway method, I know for sure it works with the MQTT, because I run 2 currently).
While I was initially enamored by the idea of running “HASS Add-ons” I found it to never work out very well for me. Restarting/Upgrade the OS meant outages on all the “Add-ons” and troubleshooting was a pain.
I’ve been much happier since I removed my Add-ons and instead run a separate machine with docker / Portainer to handle the Zwavejs2mqtt, unifi controller, postgres server, etc. I still do run a few add-ons like Samba Access/DuckDNs, but I leave the heavy add-ons to my docker instance instead.
I don’t have any personal experience with the ODROID so I’ll leave that for someone else. Finally if you do go this route here is my last little advice. For each zwavejs2mqtt I’d use a unique MQTT prefix to make it easy to troubleshoot when looking a MQTT messages. I’d also turn off auto-discovery because I think it creates way too many entities (but you can cross that bridge when you get there).
Sounds like a big but fun project. Good luck If you building to building network is also no reliable I would change my recommendation to one home assistant per building.
Thanks so much for your response. Yes, they are 5 separate zwave networks. I like the idea of only running two pieces of hardware. So, in my circumstance, would the existing smarthings hubs stay in place or be eliminated?
There are a few ways of doing it. Doing it from scratch I’d use a new rasp pi 4 with a zwave stick running raspian/docker/portainer(for easy container maintenance via a gui)/zwavejs2mqtt in each building, then a central HASS. And get rid of the SmartThings.
However you theoretically could keep the Smartthings and then use that communicate to the HASS and it would likely involve less overall work / investment. One of the best things about that approach is it likely could be done in parallel without disturbing your existing operations to much. The more I think about it, this probably is the safest/easiest option and wouldn’t involve re-including all your zwave items. However I have no experience with the Smartthings integration or how that works, so I cannot really help you there.
So the answer is, its up to you and how you architect it. If you keep the smart things you could just set up the HASS to start talking with them on the side with minimal impact to the existing things. I also don’t know if it would solve any of the problems with Smartthings wanting to be cloud connected.
Thank you for your thoroughly detailed response Matt. This has helped me a lot.
I definitely like option #2 better.
If anyone that is more familiar with Smartthings can answer Matt’s last concern?: " If you keep the smart things you could just set up the HASS to start talking with them on the side with minimal impact to the existing things. I also don’t know if it would solve any of the problems with Smartthings wanting to be cloud connected."
Does anyone know if I set HA up like this, will Smartthings will still require a connection to the Internet (cloud) to function properly?
The Smartthings integration in Home Assistant only connects HA to Smarttings and is still depending on cloud access as the Smartthings part did not change. However, that integration makes it easy to gradually move away from Smartthings as you can switch over buildings to HA one by one. (I used Smartthings, but now I only use it to control my Samsung TV better, the rest moved to Deconz (Zigbee) and zwavejs
zwave repaeater + AC power zwave devices (that act as repeater) may be used to cover large area
In my case I have some device 200’ away from bldg (300’ from hub). I use mostly AC powered device and for the far away area i use some AC powered temp/light sensor and repeater to increase reliablity. The extra sensor data I find useful as well. In this case it reduce the managment since I not have to worry about the extra hub connection, upgrade and connection(api, mqtt or other)
keeping smartthings is option. Just beware RasPi since the SD card failure will occur eventually no matter what. That said, I using Raspi hub originally for far away connection and I have no issue until one day try upgrade and could not but function still remain.
If you building to building network is also no reliable I would change my recommendation to one home assistant per building.