I Hope I Can Hang

Hey Yo’s

So been rocking a pretty unorganized smart home setup for the larger part of a year now. As a Samsung Consumer Electronics brand loyalist, that seemed a reasonable place to start. I should mention that I’ve been dreaming about this automation and integration thing since I was a kid. I had been repeatedly disappointed, not due to a lack of home automation gear specifically, but in what seemed to me was a mind numbingly snails speed of technology innovation. Finally the rate of technology evolution has turned the corner and doing that crazy ‘exponential’ thing!

Ok, so from Amazon arrived my plain white Samsung Smartthings Hub v3, two Sylvania smart plugs, and a smart bulb which was not Hue. Once I had everything placed and configured and enjoyed the ‘Holy cow, I’m controlling stuff with my phone’ moment, it didn’t take long for me to realize, "I must… I must get more, they’re aren’t enough things connected I need MORE!!! "

I began leaning as much as I could, cool sounding terms like ‘Z-wave’ and ‘Zigbee’, obviously done so because they’re important. Back to Amazon, I went and my trigger finger was leading the way! Another characteristic resulting from the loyalty to Samsung and a touch of the OCDs concerned with brand matching, I made an assumption that I should always choose a SmartThings sensor if one is available for the type I was shopping for. It will obviously work better and integrate as smoothly as all the Samsung gear I have.

I was all in, and eventually evolved into THAT guy who insists on replacing legacy dumb switches and components with a smart home equivalent regardless of whether or not a utilitarian or convenience justification could be made. If it was a possibility, I wanted every switch, light, outlet, gjw

I went from SmartThings to Hubitat to Home Assistant now I’m back to using SmartThings as my Zigbee/Z-Wave bridge. I tried to use DeConz (it lost it’s configuration), ZWave2MQTT (It couldn’t keep devices alive). I mean to try them again to completely cut out SmartThings but we’re not there yet.