With Samsung turning off support of older SmarThings hubs I’m finding myself in a bit of a bind. I’ve got a few of them at various locations that I support and now find myself under a ticking clock to get all the automation moved to something else before Samsung essentially bricks my hubs on June 30, 2021
I’ve found I love working with Home Assistant and have all of the hubs I’ve got all connected into an instance that I run in a VM.
So, what I’m looking for is basically a replacement for the ST hubs that I currently have. I need all the features without too much of a hassle or pricetag! I do use the fact that my hubs are wired, have WiFi, do Z-Wave, and ZigBee (yep, all the protocols!)
I’ve looked at a lot of options but they all are basically just ARM systems and then having to get a separate zwave/zigbee dongle and in many cases even wifi needs to be added separately. Isn’t there anything out there that has those radios built in?
What about a Hubitat Elevation? It has Zigbee and Z-wave+ built in. It does not have a WiFi radio in it, but generally people have at least one somewhere else on their local network.
This isn’t a terrible idea. Hubitat has great zigbee and zwave radios and runs groovy just like ST did, except it’s 100% local. There’s a hubitat custom integration for HA that works really great to bring all of the devices in and then hook your wifi devices directly to your HA instance. This is pretty much my setup and it’s rock solid.
I’ve done same with Hubitat. I rely on it for Zigbee and ZWave and use home Assistant for any integrations Hubitat can’t do. I use Node Red running independent from Home Assistant for all of my automations and logic and use the Hubitat integration in Home Assistant.
There is an integration called Hubconnect that allows your Smartthings hub to communicate with Hubitat hub and it would allow a slower transition of your devices to a new Hubitat hub.
So, basically my options are get go with something a little less cloud dependent (Hubitat) and hope that sometime in the future they don’t do what Samsung is doing, or get a mini of some sort (Pi, or similar) and add a sticks to it to get the protocol access I need?
Sure would be nice if we could get an actual open hub device
Unlike Smartthings, you aren’t forced to update the Hubitat hub. Additionally, because that hub doesn’t rely on the cloud, if Hubitat went out of business tomorrow, the hub would continue working for any local integrations.
