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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.