2.2.4 - Hub Mesh - let your hubs talk to each other

Well, it's not quite a social network for your beloved hubs, but bear with me.

Here at Hubitat, we wanted an easy way to reuse the same device in automations spread across several hubs. And we mess with our drivers and devices a lot, so it would have to pick up all the changes on the fly. We wanted to pick a hub and a device on it, create some sort of a link to it on another hub, and be done with it. If a driver changed and a device got a new button because of that driver change, we'd like that button to just appear everywhere the device is used. Well, wishes are all good, but with 2.2.4 we also got time to implement it. Here's how to use the new Hub Mesh:

  1. Go to Devices and click on Hub Mesh:
    image

  2. If your hubs run 2.2.4 and are on the same local network, they will appear on the list of hubs in Hub Mesh screen.

  3. Share local devices you want to use on other local hubs.

  4. Go to another hub and pick selected devices to use them locally and click Create Devices. This screenshot is made on the same hub, but you get the idea.

  5. Selected devices are now ready to use through the link. This is it! You can also see what happens if device is no longer shared or if hub becomes unavailable - it is disabled and has OFFLINE in its name. Hub mesh keeps track of these things.


There are a few limitation. For example, you can't update device information through the link. And since hub mesh uses network to communicate, it's a bit slower than local setup. On the upside, hub mesh keeps linked device in sync even if network connection temporarily breaks down. Things like device name change or new capabilities will propagate to the linked device on their own in under a minute. And devices can be shared and un-shared as often as you want, with linked devices enabled or disabled accordingly. But in every other way, a linked device is just another device. A few implementation intricacies aside, the hub code treats it the same way.

Enjoy and and us know if you encounter any issues!

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