Just got on to HA a week ago and having a blast! I’ve had Smartthings Hub for years now with various devices (plugs, lights, thermostat). It’s pretty stable with maybe a brain fart here and there.
For HA, I moved everything from Smarthings except Zigbee/ZWave devices. I’ve attached everything else either using a native integration or through Homekit. HACS further expanded what I can bring into my home environment.
On the Smarthings side, I’ve gotten the Edge drivers and have setup some virtual devices as switches to handle a Zooz remote I picked up.
My question is this: should I just leave the Smarthings Hub as the manager for Zigbee/Zwave or bring that functionality directly into HA with some USB antennas/devices? Some reading I done seems to suggest that there are issues with range on these devices.
The Smarthings Hub is on the main floor whereas my servers are in the basement (HA VM on UNRAID).
I used to use SmartThings also. When I started in HA I used the SmartThings integration so that the ST hub was my Zigbee/Z-Wave controller, but this uses the cloud to get from HA to ST. I have since purchased USB dongles for those protocols (Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 P and Zooz 700 Z-Wave dongles), put them on USB extension cables, and they work great. If your ST hub works in its current location, it’s likely that the USB dongles will also work well.
IMHO - Add a ZWave and Zigbee coordinator to your setup and move away from ST. You will have to tweak your ZWave and Zigbee setup and it takes more care and feeding than with ST because of how they abstract stuff but the pain (most of it- only once) is worth it
Theres hundreds of reasons but these stand out for me.
The HA > st integration is cloud. So all your automation from HA to ST is round tripping a cloud service.
They (ST) can’t make up thier mind on how many devices are supported in a location (200? 300? how will it exhibit? Do we cut off end users? Dunno we do it differently depending on which app you’re using) and they’re increasingly making it hard for complex setups. When you get outside thier ‘established rules’ (that they didn’t tell you the end user about) your stuff just stops working…
When they make a decision like how they change routines - they can reach into your config and inflict on your setup whereas in HA you can choose to take the change or not and HA has no control of your config.
ST is a mere shadow of what it was pre-Samsung at this point and I no longer recommend it to anyone.
I once had HA & Smartthings working together but switched to HA for full control of my devices.
Even with EDGE drivers I had to pay for, I would still need to use Smartthings CLI to fully control them. Like, disabling and enabling schedule on my T6 Zwave Thermostat. Then there were features Smartthings didn’t have when use with HA. Then there were some things Smartthings was doing that even support didn’t know of to figure out what’s wrong. Of course, the Smartthings updates that would break certain automations.
I moved everything to HA with a Zooz USB Zwave 700 stick and a Sonoff USB Zigbee stick and couldn’t be happier.
I would definitely recommend switching completely to HA.
Which then brings me to another decision. I currently run HAOS as a VM on UNRAID. If I were to make HA the single platform, would it be better to run it on a dedicated machine? I’m thinking about things like pass through USB devices, ease of restore.
I was also not sure of the various versions. I did start with a Docker install and then went VM.
If the machine has the compute and memory and storage available everything else is academic.
You can get network based coordinators to eliminate the USB pass through problems for virtual machines… At which point there’s basically no difference.
For Bluetooth esp Bluetooth proxies are recommended
For matter you can use literally anyone’s Thread Border Router.
For ZWave / Zigbee - look at your preferred integration and get a recommended network based coordinator.
Backup and restore for haos is the same no matter what. You just get the added benefit of VM snapshotting if your run in virtual.
Thanks for all the feedback. I think I need to get a little more familiar with the infrastructure layer before I go building out my own home automation network. It’s only been in the last 3,4 years that I jazzed up my home LAN with a POE switch, APs, extenders and VLANs🙂
My past experience leans more towards applications then infrastructure. Lots of fun though!
Zwave and Zigbee do not run on your home Lan. They are isolated networks. A network coordinator would live on your LAN. But it’s only a bridge - that’s it. A direct connection between HA and the coordinator.
