My current setup consists of Lutron Caseta Pro Hub and a bunch of dimmers, a Google Home Mini in every room, and some MagicHome light strips. We generally only use voice commands to turn lights on and off.
I want to add some additional functionality and wondering if Hubitat is right for this. I have used Home Assistant before but I didn't feel like spending all why free time troubleshooting configs so I abandoned it.
I need to know if I can use Habitat to achieve the following:
Control Lutron Caseta switches/dimmers using my Lutron Pro Hub.
Control devices using voice commands to Google home.
Trigger actions (mostly lights) based on motion sensors like the Lowes Iris v2 (I just ordered 20 of these).
Perform actions conditionally based on time of day or day/night cycle (for example, if motion detected and it is night time, turn on lights in that room).
Control lighting based on which Google Home device received that command. For instance, if I say "Turn off lights" to the living room GH, I want it to turn off only the living room lights.
Set conditions for rules using voice commands. For instance, if I say "hey Google, keep the lights on", I want the lights to stay on regardless of motion detection.
Integrate with my Vista 20P wired alarm and control arm/disarm features. I'm considering Alarm Decoder or a similar device. I primarily would like the alarm to arm itself as STAY every 5 minutes in case people forget to arm it.
Use some method of detecting whether people are home. Maybe our iPhones or some other means.
Can I do all of the above without spending the next year doing research and troubleshooting config files? Thanks a bunch.
I forgot to add, I would also love to have Google home TTS (i.e. action triggers a spoken prompt via Google Home, preferably in specific room, or on all of them at once).
You can definitely do most of what you want to do: Hubitat integrates well with Lutron devices via the Pro Bridge, and you can create automations to do anything you want between two devices Hubitat supports, like your lights and motion sensors--including restrictions for things like time of day. The mobile app supports presence, but there are even more solutions like Life360 (and a variety of community solutions) you can use as well. TTS is possible with the Chomecast integration, but I'm not sure it works well for everyone yet (it's been in beta for a while and some have reported that it may cause slowdowns).
For what I'm not sure about:
I'm not sure about your alarm panel, but Konnected.io has two products that replace or integrate with (depending on the product) existing systems, and I think others have found ways to do similar things as well. I don't know enough about your specific panel to say more.
Your Google Home questions are less clear: I'm not sure if GH has a way to tell what room you're talking to. If it does, you could create something that turns on or off a specific switch in Hubitat, but Hubitat has nothing specific in its GH integration that would allow knowledge of specific rooms. Perhaps people have found workarounds (did Home Assistant support this?). Similarly, for your "keep the lights on" thing, you'll have to figure out a way to make that work. I use a "virtual kill switch" that I turn on when I don't want my otherwise mostly-motion-based lighting to change (I just ask Alexa to turn on that virtual switch directly, but you could make a politely-phrased Routine like "keep the lights on" that would do the same).
I also moved from Home Assistant (and previously SmartThings) to Hubitat and assure you that a lot less of my time is spent editing configuration files, which for the most part don't really exist on Hubitat.
Google and room awareness, that's a Google feature not a home automation feature.
Whatever room the Google device is in on the Google home app is what Google will use by default when we tell it to turn the lights on or off. So whatever lights are in the same room as the Google device will be what gets turned in and off.
You can do that with any Google automation that is supported, not just hubitat. At least for lights.
Ok great, thank you! So if I understand correctly, I could configure “virtual switches” within Hubitat, and then set rules within Google Home that would control those switches. I assume I would just add those switches to Google Home using the Hubitat integration? Hubitat could then detect the switch being in on/off state and I could use that state in Hubitat’s more complex rule sets. Is that correct?
I think I understand what you are saying but let me rephrase to make sure. I initially thought that all the rule sets would be in Hubitat and I would just direct Google Home commands to trigger certain things in Hubitat. But I believe what you are saying is that I would use rules within Google Home itself to control certain things (i.e. lights turning on/off within the same room), and then use other more involved automation actions within Hubitat? What I still don’t use seats s is how I would achieve something like the following:
My daughter says “hey google, I’m going to sleep” in her room. I want the lights to turn off in her room (google home can do that) but I also want the motion sensors to stop for the night in case dog walks in or she stirs in her sleep. Perhaps I can use a “virtual switch” (see the post above) but could I trigger a specific virtual switch (one for her room) based on which google home device was activated?
Basically, what I use is a hybrid approach. I tell Alexa "time for bed" and it does some actions of its own (locking doors and saying things like what's on my calendar for tomorrow and the weather for tomorrow), but also flipping a couple of virtual switches that trigger rules in HE as well that set up the house for overnight mode.
AFAIK, no. This is not possible in a native way. What you could do is have custom routines trigger off a specific set of phrases she would have to say. So, you could create a routine for her and have her say a phrase like "Hey Google, I'm going to sleep in my room" to activate it. You could also have a phrase like "Hey Google, start sleep mode in [daughter's name] room" as well. But, GH would have to be triggered using one of those phrases in order for it to be specific and therefore control a specific virtual switch in HE.
One thing you could also do is to have the same switch be flipped for any good night routine and then have HE try to decide who's switch it was by using time constraints. For young children, this is pretty easy as a lot of kids are typically on a fairly constant schedule. So, in your HE rule, you could trigger on the virtual switch turning on/off and then getting the current time. If the time falls between say, 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, then assume it's the kids going to bed. For older children (teenagers), it might be a bit more difficult to narrow down a time frame.
The way I address this (granted, it's just my wife and I and 2 dogs) is that any motion rules are constrained by modes. So, when the house is in overnight mode, the motion sensors in the bedrooms don't cause any lights to come on because my rules don't allow it. However, the hallway, living room, kitchen, and bathroom lights all come on to very dim levels based upon motion and turn off very quickly as opposed to my other modes.
Thank you! So it sounds like these things are achievable to some degree, with maybe some small limitations that I can live with. I have encountered similar limitations with Home Assistant but (hopefully) the big difference will be the ease of setup. With HASS I would have to spend like 2 months figuring out how to write the configs and troubleshooting why it wasn’t working.
I keep an instance of HA running just for my holiday lighting routines as I have it installed on my home server (quad teamed NICs with 128GB RAM), which is beefy enough to handle the complex transitions and rules behind my displays. However, I still HATE HA's rule system. Why, after years of development, HA still doesn't have a graphical rule editor is baffling.
In comparison, HE is MUCH easier to work with and just as powerful.
I'm pretty sure you can do this. Google devices are room aware (at least for lights, TV's and speakers, from memory). I dont do it, but I'm pretty sure you could do this.
Yes, they are room aware, but there is no capability to get (in HE) which device was spoken to and AFAIK, there is also no way to trigger a GH routine based upon which device was spoken to.
So, while lights, TVs, switches, etc are room aware in the GH ecosystem, you cannot tell GH to turn off/on a switch in a GH routine based upon what room the device is in.
Cant you say to the google home in Sally's room: "turn on the night light". Night light a virtual switch in HE and exposed to Google, the switch is located in Sally's Room in Google Home, which then turns on night mode for Sally's room in HE?
Edit: I'm only guesing. I could be wrong. Night light could also double as a real night light.
