Like many of you here - I am tired of SmartThings and I need to get out. I’ve been looking at Hubitat or Home Assistant (or maybe the combo that Jason put up).
Outside of that - what devices are people using with HomeAssistant?
I need ZigBee and Z-Wave radios - and maybe I’m slow, but it’s been challenging to figure out what the “best” choice is. Maybe it’s been said before - but that should be something right up on the Getting Started Wiki.
What broke me from SmartThings - This morning, a bunch of my devices all turned on all at once. and not a single thing was logged! When I check the IDE, nothing shows being flipped on or off!
Well, you’re in a Home Assistant forum, so of course the recommendation is to go with HA!
Seriously though, I also looked at Hubitate, HA, SmartThings, and OpenHAB. It was a close call between HA and OpenHAB. I don’t (usually) regret going with HA.
I also looked at protocols. My Raspberry Pi 3B+ already supports WiFi. Zigbee and Z-Wave both looked good. So I bought a HUSBZB-1 USB stick which does both. Again, no regrets.
I started with Zigbee and haven’t even tried Z-Wave. Not only do I not regret it, but I’m a bigger Zigbee fan every day. I use the native ZHA integration. It has been absolutely flawless; literally plug-and-play and everything just works. Reliably. I simply scattered a few mains-powered devices around the house and all the devices build the mesh network on their own.
I can’t say the same for the WiFi devices I’ve tried. They are finicky to set up. They all want to use their own apps, their own cloud back end, and they don’t like being anywhere the WiFi network isn’t 100%.
Maybe it’s just dumb luck. Maybe my needs are different than most. But I figured I’d give you one perspective.
I started on ST then went to Hubitat.
My Hubitat hub died right before the new Z-Wave JS add-on came out as a built in option.
Zigbee with a Conbee-2 stick using the Deconz add-on is very reliable.
I was having major issues with the Z-Wave add-ons that were included with the default add-ons.
Then I tried Z-Wave JS, if that didn’t work I was going to buy a new Hubitat hub.
Z-Wave JS works very well for all of my devices.
It has slowed down a little bit, which is disappointing, but I’m also planning on replacing my Z-Wave dimmers. It might be a GE/Jasco issue as well because I feel like my Z-Wave contact sensors are really fast in comparison.
No perfect answer but that’s where I am. All in on HA.
Let me know if you need help if you go down that path.
Also I’m using the Aeotec Gen-5 stick for Z-Wave.
Awesome - thank you both for your input. I’m going to look at the USB sticks you guys mentioned.
I think the wiki should have a section “came here from SmartThings - this is the stuff you’ll need” section. I’d seen the HW you mentioned when I was clicking around the site - but there was maybe too many of them listed. It’d be great if we had a poll or some sort of “popular Z-wave / Zigbee” options somewhere. I’d assume a lot of people come here after being frustrated from ST or whatever other option they were on.
I’ve been following HASS for a while now, and am very close to making the jump. I started on Vera, went to ST, and hopefully ending with HASS, and nada mas!
I was a smartthings user for 4 years. I have a mix of smartthings sensors (Zigbee) some zwave sensors and few wifi switches which I was using in smartthings.
I started moving things to HA slowly using the new smartthings integration which allowed me to automate things connected to smartthings from HomeAssistant. Worked well but again this is done using cloud so if your internet if finnicky or goes off you loose functionality.
I got HUSBZB-1 stick as it has both zwave and zigbee. Its not the latest so there are better individual devices but then you are paying twice the price. You can upgrade zigbee side firmware but zwave side you have to open the stick and do couple of things before you can do it. Without any of the upgrades this has been working quite well with 20 zigbee and 10 zwave devices. Range is fine too and if you are careful with repeater placement you will never find dropouts.
ZHA and zwavejs2mqtt works well with the stick. I have a raspberry pi 3b+ with individual docker setup for
HomeAssistant
zwavejs2mqtt
MQTT Broker
NodeRed
I do a backup of sd card every month or less depending on the amount of changes I am doing or if I am adding new devices. Overall pretty happy with the performance
I might follow the same strategy to move slowly over.
One thing that I used to love about the Classic ST app is that you can go into a device on the app and immediately see what apps/automations it’s associated with. Is HASS similar?
I was a ST user too then went to Habitat when integrated my heat controls and wanted local processing. At this point I use a mixture of HE and HA. My HE hub is mostly used for its radios and uses jason’s integration into HA. I also use HubDuino in HE (Used ST anything before that) as there is no is no real easy way to use Mega boards in HA. I will say if going from ST straight to HA will be a hell of a jump. HA is quite a bit more hands on then ST. HE falls in between as far as easy to use and ability to “set and forget” for longer periods of time if life gets busy.
Thanks for your input - do you mean in things like updates, etc - or complexity of setting up rules? I don’t mind putting in the effort to configure it initially, but don’t want to have to babysit it.
You can do that with homeassistant as well. Click on devices select one and if it has any automation/scripts associated with the device it shows up.
Easiest way to get familiar with HomeAssistant with few devices will be using smartthings integration.
Pull all the devices from smartthings to HA. Then you can browse all different parts of HA and see how things work. You will have real devices to play around as well. Good thing is if it does not work you can go back to smartthings and you will not have to do a single thing just turn of HA.
Currently I have only Aeon Labs Home energy meter v1 connected to smartthings and to HA using integration. Not sure what to do with the smartthings hub so will keep it for time being. There is an old integration of smartthings using MQTT which works local, so might be able to reuse hub as a radio device for connecting to zigbee and zwave but have not tried.
Thanks for that screenshot and info! Yes, I think using the SmartThings integration would be a great place to see if HA can do what I want. Wonder if the ST API is more stable than the platform or if it’s all one in the same.
Either way, I think that is a good battle plan. I was going to pickup an rpi - but can just as easily spin up a VM to see how HA would work for me. And then if things go well, branch out to buy hardware.
HA pushes more updates than any other hub I’ve used. HA is well documented to have quite a few breaking changes with updates (though seems to be getting better, at least for me). That is where is is nice running it on a VM. Makes it simple to go back. You may find on some updates you have to go back and fix a device or something that stopped working after a update.
As far as rules. Its no more complicated as any other engine in my opinion. My favorite has always been webcore as I’m not a huge fan of clunky GUI interfaces. I wish there was a way to use it in HA like I was able to in HE and ST. However I am finding Node Red to be pretty powerful.
