Hi all!
So here is the deal, I bought a Nvidia Shield TV couple years ago. Then Samsung/Nvidia announced cooperation to get smartthings on the Shield, and had a promotion to get the Smartthings Link for the Shield for $10 (instead of $40), which I jumped on. Soon after I got everything setup with Smartthings, I discovered Home Assistant, which I fell in love with.
Like many, I went through the hassle of getting stjohnson’s bridge running in hass and smartthings IDE with mqtt in between, wrote all my automation in HASS, and was very happy with the setup!
Now, Nvidia released a new OS on the Shield (Android 8), and for some reason it seems that incoming messages on the bridge’s port are refused (ST -> HASS ok, HASS -> ST blocked), so none of my automation/control in HASS is working.
That being said, I am looking for a new solution that doesn’t rely on another piece of hardware like the Shield, with HASS a “must have”.
Should I get a new Smartthings hub and move my config over, and still rely on bridge/mqtt in between?
Home Assistant has full integration with Wink, should I get a Wink2 Hub?
Any other hub with good hardware compatibility reasonably priced?
I would like to stay away from a z-wave/zigbee dongle directly connected to HASS (I do like the convenience and ease of use of Smartthings for example), and absolutely need Google Home capabilities.
Thanks a lot in advance for any recommendation!!!
Damien
I have Z wave and Zigbee sticks that feed straight into my Home Assistant machine and it works great. If you really want a seperate hub, I hear that Vera is probably your best bet since it supports local processing (no cloud). I believe that Wink, and know that SmartThings, definitely rely on the cloud and should really be your last option.
Any particular reason you don’t want to buy a Z stick for box? There is a lot of support on the forums for that kind of setup.
Thanks for your reply!
Here are a few details on my setup…
I have a Windows server in my basement, running an Ubuntu VM with HASSIO in docker.
I am sure it is possible to have the physical USB connection redirected to the VM, but I’d have some research to do. Or I could dedicate a box for HASSIO…that’s possible too.
My Shield TV is in my living room, central in my house, so I can reliably control devices from my upstairs floor to my basement. I am not sure if the range of the stick from my basement to upstairs would work well enough.
Also, especially when adding Google Home in the mix, I think the cloud is inevitable. Even Home Assistant requires a Home Assistant Cloud registration to natively support Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa…
Z wave and Zigbee are mesh technologies. As long as you have enough hard wired devices (outlets, plugs, switches, etc.), they will all act as repeaters and fill the gap in the distance. You can even buy dedicated repeaters. I obviously don’t know the layout of your house, but I believe this should work OK.
Alternatively, like you said, you could just get a Raspberry Pi (or NUC for that matter), and run everything from upstairs.
Passthrough should be pretty easy as well. I actually run Proxmox on a NUC and have an Ubuntu Server VM running a Docker stack with my Home Assistant stuff. I pass through a Z wave stick, a Zigbee stick, and the Bluetooth radio on the NUC.
You should be fine with a separate hub, but you will likely get more support with a localized instance (dongles). Do some searches on Vera (or other hub) here in the forums to see if there are any issues, lag, etc. with going that route.
As far as the cloud goes, Home Assistant cloud just allows you to integrate Google Home into your setup a little easier. No processing is done in the cloud other than Google sending the command to Hass via the Home Assistant cloud link. You could always just set it up manually yourself and not use Home Assistant cloud. Not overly difficult, but more involved.
If you want use voice services (google home or Alexa) the cloud is, as you say, inevitable just because of the nature of that functionality.
Smarthing or wink relying on the cloud is a totally different thing.
If the internet goes down and you have google home running you won’t be able to use voice commands. If you use smarthings or wink then you lose all automations and control of devices from your frontend.