I am royally sick of Smartthings Zigbee sensors. My garage door sensors fail 25% of the time... very irritating.
I am pretty impressed by the Lutron Caseta and Smart Bridge Pro integration into Hubitat... anyone want to bounce around ideas on how to convert a pico remote to a garage door open sensor?
Could it be done, probably. But it isn't the best tool for the job here. That is like trying to use a banana to pound in nails. Sure it might work, but wouldn't it be better to use a hammer (tilt sensor) instead?
The Samsung tilt sensor works very well for most everyone, and that is what I would use. If you are trying to avoid Zigbee, there are Zwave tilt sensors by Ecolink.
I gotta agree, if the end goal is a garage door sensor, I’m not sure why one would start out with a Lutron Pico and hack that, unless it was mainly to prove it could somehow be done?
You don’t by any chance mean a garage door controller do you?
Because my two smart things tilt sensors currently are telling Hubitat that the doors are open when the doors are actually shut. And I am SUPER sick of that. Yeah maybe it is a mesh thing... I don't know... but I can't have this level of unreliability all the time. It worked well for a number of months but every now and then it becomes unreliable. That is no good. I mean I can't understand how some of these folks have like 300 devices and are happy with everything. That seems impossible to me! :). The pico's seems solid. I like the non-mesh low frequency approach.
I agree, Lutron’s proprietary ClearConnect protocol works really well. It’s just that the pico is a button controller device, it’s not a sensor. Lutron makes occupancy (motion) sensors as well (though none that will integrate with HE via a Caseta Pro bridge). Different tools for different jobs, as @neonturbo alluded to.
Along the same lines, Smartthings button devices and tilt sensors both use zigbee to communicate wirelessly. But other than that similarity, they’re different devices.
If you’re looking for a more reliable tilt sensor, I suggest looking elsewhere than a Pico.
You could put together a wired sensor with an Esp8266 or similar board, which can integrate with hubitat over your LAN.
I have around 45 zigbee devices. Key is to have some AC powered repeaters in the mesh.
Since ditching the Cree bulbs and GE Link bulbs. Zero issues. Zero.
Like how many feet would you say you can go before you need to have a repeaters?
It can depend a lot on the size/shape of your home, building materials, other sources of interference, the devices you’re trying to use, etc.
I suggest reading this article from the hub documentation pages if you haven’t already:
https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=How_to_Build_a_Solid_Zigbee_Mesh
Download the Hubitat app
