Switching From Smarthings : Questions

Hi All,

After all of the questions being left unanswered i’m looking to move from ST to HA.

I just have a few questions if anyone could help, i’d be greatful.

  1. I have a Intel NUC doing nothing at the moement, it used to run Kodi etc and i’m wondering if it’s powerfull enough for HA? It also was capable of running Windows/Ubunutu.

  2. Lastly i’m in the UK. I’m looking for a Z wave & Zigbee stick, ideally combined. As ever i’m not looking to spend massive amounts? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

  1. NUC is plenty powerful enough. Plenty use a Pi, personally I’m on a Mac Mini M1 virtual machine, but that is overkill if it was the only thing I was running on it.
  2. I can’t talk to Zigbee, but I use an Aeotec ZStick 5+ for Zwave. I think many people do the same.

You won’t regret the move to HA, I did it a couple of years ago. Seems to be a way bigger developer community and I found it much easier to create meaningful automations. I use Node Red for that, but I believe most use HA inbuilt capabilities.

Thanks.

I think I need ZigBee too.

How do you find devices that sit on the WiFi network. Can HA work those?

Hive heating???

I also made the switch from SmartThings to HA. I use a Pi4, which works fine but as you have a NUC going spare its a good upgrade. I use the AEOTEC for Z-wave and a Conbee II for Zigbee. If I were starting now I might opt for the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongle instead.

FWIW, the hardest part fort me was the change in how I did my automations and dashboards. I used to use ActionTiles for the Dashboard and WebCore for automations. Lovelace and HA automations are much more powerful but a lot harder to pick up initially.

Best of luck with the move. The local execution is lightining fast and reliability has been excellent for me.

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I’m trying to think if I have anything on Wifi that is ‘discovers’, and possibly not. I suspect it will depend if the device is advertising it’s capabilities. I do however have devices on Wifi, such as TV/Sky boxes and these for fine. Phones and things like that are typically discovered via your router.

With regards Hive (which I don’t have, but I have Nest), I can see that the integration is ‘cloud_polling’, so it will actually be getting the info via the Hive cloud api rather than contacting the device locally. That said I haven’t looked in detail at the code, so it might always swap to local but I would suspect not.

Yes Hive is via the cloud. it works well enough though.

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Well it didnt take for me to hit a bump in the road.

I downloaded and flashed the x86 OS to a USB drive and booted to it.

I was presented with a command line.

I thought the USB would install HA onto my hard drive like most other OS’s would.

Help?