I have two Lutron hubs, and I am porting a SmartThings setup over to HA.
I noticed HA discovered each hub twice — once as a Lutron device and once as HomeKit. I set up the HomeKit versions discovered in HA and it’s working great. That said, should I also set up the Lutron hubs it has discovered? Any downside to doing so? (And what’s the upside to doing so??)
Thanks!
Only one is required. Select “Ignore” for the other or you will end up with duplicate entities. This can be confusing unless you know which ones you want to interact with and put in your dashboard. And it takes up twice as much room in your database. But you can use both if you want. I use both musiccast and Yamaha network integrations to talk to my media amplifiers as one has a lot of features I use in automations and one is a simpler interface for my dashboard.
The reason for the duplicate discovery is that Home Assistant can discover devices by a variety of methods. Some devices advertise their presence using more than one method. Home Assistant presents all of these to you so you can choose which to use and which to ignore.
Homekit is a common second protocol to the device’s “native” discovery method. Sometimes this is easier to set up, but often the Homekit method has less functionality than the other method. I can give you another example I’m familiar with, Lifx.
It supports both Homekit and Lifx discovery (zeroconf). Homekit is easier to set up but it misses a lot of features. Using the Lifx discovery I can change a light’s parameters while it is off and use some built in effects. Homekit discovery does not support this.
I’m not familiar with Lutron however, so am not sure if you are missing anything by using Homekit. Read the Lutron Documentation, check if there are Lutron integration specific services available, rather than just “plain vanilla” light/switch/fan services.
Thanks, this is super helpful. Much appreciated.
Sounds like it’s worth me checking to see if the Lutron integration has any improved functionality over the HomeKit method. I will tinker with that, unless some Good Samaritan here already knows the answer!
Thx.