Very glad to have found this thread. I had been pretty happy with SmartThings with several custom groovy apps (MyQ, home bridge, flume lock user managements, Konnected alarm, etc…). However for everyone using the groovy or custom DTHs Samsung just flipped us the bird as they broke their groovy integration as of January 2023. I preemptively purchased Habitat this past Dec. thinking that would be my next move.
Then out of pure chance I happened to install HA on a friends machine to record some cameras using MotionEye. I hadn’t touched HA in about 3 years and to be honest that experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found HA really overly complex and unstable at the time (was using HASSIO on a Pi). However my recent experience was quiet the opposite. So much so that now that I’m about to get started moving all my ~90 devices from STH to HE I paused and wondered if I should be giving HA another shot (using it as the main integration hub via usb ZB & ZW radios).
Reading some of these posts is inspiring me to use HE as just a hub for those zigbee & wave radio devices (bulk of my home) since I already bought it. I did already have a ZW USB z-stick s2 laying around so I got it setup with HA last night but was a little sad to see I couldn’t start pairing mode in HA. I had to unplug the stick and press the button on it near the switch. Was hoping for a friendly web UI for adding/removing ZW devices. There was an ok Web UI for adding / removing devices (although removing was not working)… YMMV. So reading about using the HE hub with the API integration sounds like a great compromise. I just hope that HE takes full advantage of all the features of all my Zigbee & ZWave devices.
One thing that I have to say worked really well in STH was their “Smart Home Monitor” which was basically three sections to monitor alarm hardware, leak detector hardware, smoke & co2 detector hardware. It was super easy to setup though lacked customizability. I believe I can get that going again with HE (if I understood that correctly) since they’re both written with groovy.
Few questions for you guys if anyone has experience with any of the following anything you could answer would be greatly appreciated.
- Have you had any stability issues with HE?
- If so was it the latest hardware/sw?
- Has anyone had any reason to use zwave, zigbee devices directly with HA for any reason (like missing device features or functions)?
- I mainly intend to interact with my home using Apples Home app. I’ll also likely eventually get around to creating some custom dashboard for some fire tablets I have wall mounted. Any recs on clean HA dashboard themes?
- Is there any problems hooking HomeBridge up with HE?
- Does HE have a HomeKit integration directly?
- I understand HA has a way of sharing out devices directly via HomeKit, would that be better for any reason?
- Is HA or HE better at integrating with ZW locks?
Again
thank you guys for all the great info on here already. Cheers from San Diego!