Hi, I’m new to Home Assistant but I’ve been using Smarthings and other home products like Nest,Hive,Blink etc for a few years now. Like many I have become increasing frustrated at the problems with ST and more importantly the total lack of support. So I looking for alternatives and I have a couple of questions I am hoping to get some clarity around please.
Fist one is migrating from ST. I can see the built in integration which looks great but what is the best way to migrate, is it to keep the ST hub and use this integration or setup zigbee and zwave services and move each device over time.
Second one is how reliable is a Raspberry PI as a hub and does it work well with zigbee and zwave dongles? Good idea or bad ?
All replies and help is appreciated, thank you Andy
I would get a zigbee/z-wave dongle and connect the devices directly to Home Assistant. The SmartThings integration is cloud-based, so it requires Internet access. Using a dongle to connect the devices to Home Assistant directly means you don’t need Internet access to control them.
I’ve been using a raspberry pi 3B+ for 10 months now with a combo zigbee/z-wave dongle with no issues.
HUSBZB-1. Also clarification: I haven’t been using the dongle for 10 months, just the pi with Home Assistant. I’ve been using the dongle for a month or two now.
ok thanks . Read a bit about that device with Rasberry on the ST community forum… They suggest using a pc instead to stop zigbee drop outs which Id prefer as I’m more a windows person. Will have a think about that as cost could be a lot higher than Raspberry.
Interesting. Not really sure why it would make a difference.
You can always go with a different dongle if you want. The Conbee has favorable reviews but that’s only a Zigbee stick, so you’d need a separate Z-wave one.
The most cost effective measure (since you already on ST) is to use the SmartThings as a Z-Wave/Zigbee hub that communicates to Home Assistant. Integration is incredibly easy if you use Home Assistant Cloud. Just a few clicks and logins, and all your ST sensors and lights will appear in Home Assistant.
I use this setup at three houses and it’s been working great for me. Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi tends to run into unexplainable crashes, even when using the official AC adapter and high endurance SD cards. When this happens, the lights still function at the house as basic lighting automations are still running on the ST hub.
Once you are comfortable with Home Assistant and it hasn’t crashed in weeks, then you can try migrating your Z-Wave/Zigbee devices to a USB Z-Wave radio. I’ll warn you that it will likely take a whole weekend to complete if you’re lucky. Using Home Assistant is a long learning process, so start slow, add things one at a time, and MAKE BACKUPS. If you haven’t seen this Hass.io Google Drive Backup add-on, then try it out.
Been running Home Assistant on a 3B+ for 10 months now… can’t say I’ve had any “unexplainable crashes.” Moved away from an SD card a few months ago though. Installed Raspbian on an SSD and ran the Hassio installer on that.
Good points about Home Assistant having a big learning curve and taking a while though.
It’s all anecdotal, but I run Home Assistant instances at four different locations, all with very similar configs, components and Lovelace cards. At two locations, (running rPi3 and Asus TInkerboard S), they crash every week or so and require a power cycle. Unfortunately I can’t check the logs or access the instance via SSH on those devices so I can’t properly diagnose the issue.
At two other locations, I’m running rPI3Bs and they haven’t crashed in over a month. One is a simple setup and another is quite advanced, so I’m surprised the advanced setup hasn’t crashed yet.
At my main location, I migrated from rPI to a laptop, and that has been running great for a week now, even though I try to crash it with add-ons, custom components and cards.
Every SBC I use is using an official AC adapter, high-endurance SD card or flash storage. I limit recorder to record only a few entities and days to reduce the wear and tear on SD cards. I really wish I could figure out the root cause of the crashes since my friends and family like how small and energy-efficient the rPI is.