Came to buy the Hubitat Elevation hub because it is local, but can integrate to cloud for voice etc., and also because it is expendable/configurable. seemed like the best choice at the beginning, but as I'm learning more outside of the sheltered Insteon life I lived, I have more questions than answers.
So, being an Insteon refugee, I'm trying to decide whether to integrate or migrate. I see lots of conversations regarding integrating with Hubitat Elevation by using Home Assistant and the plugins to get to the hub, blah blah...
So, I go to learn about Home Assistant, as I am learning I see that HA has the Pi-based "Yellow" hub arriving soon, which looks to be able to do all that HE does.
My research then leads me to Homeseer (HS), where it looks like that platform could handle all my needs.... but then I see many posts here of people fleeing the HS platform with comments of great frustration and relief to find HE.
Making my questions and confusions more pertinent is the fact that I was one of the lost souls who jumped on another sinking ship years ago - Anybody remember "Castle OS"? A valiant effort, but grossly over-promised and under-capitalized, I fear.
It didn't survive, but it DID leave me with a working low-power fanless mini PC which I could easily load Linux on to use as a server for either HA or HS
I guess my bottom line quandary is, is the HE my best solution, or HA or do I need to use the two or three of them together or just what sort of digital spaghetti casserole am I going to be building here?
My key questions are:
Do I need to use more than one platform/software/system to do what I need?
Should I avoid HS altogether?
What is HE bringing to my experience that HA with the Yellow hub cannot?
What was the other question I was going to ask here? I'm so confused...
I hope I can get some insight here, THANK you all in advance. And now I am going to get back to inventing a new cocktail called the "Automation Frustration"
You haven't exactly said what you WANT to do as far as home automation. Are you trying to maintain insteon and integrate it with Hubitat or are you abandoning insteon all together? What is it that you are looking for Hubitat to do for you?
I'll say this, you can integrate Insteon with HE. @SmartHomePrimer has had several threads about this.
Other than that you are starting over from scratch...
That's up to you. I know you probably want someone to tell you the answer, but that would be like me telling you what flavor of ice cream I've decided you like. I will tell you that I use both Hubitat and Home Assistant. Read the prologue of the Home Assistant Device Bridge thread and you'll understand why.
I personally would. There's too much negative I've read about it, and frankly you can do just about everything with Hubitat and Home Assistant together.
Well I'm not going to pretend I know what the Yellow hub is going to be. I would have bought a Home Assistant Blue myself if it were available, but times are tough for obtaining electronics. I've been running Home Assistant Supervised in Virtual Box on an old MacBook Pro laptop for a few weeks. Before that I was running Home Assistant Core in a python virtual environment on an older MacBook. Both are very capable. Supervised brings both some advantages and some disadvantages to HA Core, and a VM also brings with it some advantages and some disadvantages. But if you want to try it out for free and you have an old laptop available, setting up Virtual Box is fast and easy. As soon as the aluminum case I ordered arrives, I will be switching off of HA in a virtual environment and onto a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with a high endurance microSD card.
So for some, HA is plenty, but for me I enjoy the ease of building complex automations with Hubitat, combined with the large amount of supported cloud-only devices that HA has. I try to stay local, but that's not always possible without limiting myself more than I'm willing to. I also prefer to have my Zigbee network spread out between four different radios. In my case, that is Hue for bulbs, HA for Xiaomi devices (they are super stable with a Conbee 2 Zigbee USB), and HE for two different categories of Zigbee devices. My main HE hub has most of my Zigbee and Z-Wave devices on it, except for the Xiaomi stuff. My secondary HE hub has the problem children on it (i.e. Old chatty Z-Wave devices and problematic Zigbee devices such as old OSRAM stuff). I have a third HE hub, but I just use it for running a database and testing on occasion, so its radios are disabled.
Again, this is going to be a personal choice you have to make. Both work, but I much prefer the integration with Hubitat. It's much faster and more responsive than the HA integration is today. However, there's a new Insteon control panel that is currently an add-on to HA, but will soon be integrated into the HA Insteon integration. It allows you to set Insteon device defaults like Ramp rate and dim level defaults. So if I need to make a change to one of my Insteon devices, I enable the HA integration, make the necessary adjustments, and then disable it. Much more convenient than doing the button dance at each device.
I use Node-RED (NR) as my rules controller for the Hubitat (HE), reduces overhead and has some great flexibility with connecting to other services. Have also been playing around with Home Assistant (HA) for a while.
The knocks on HA have been it is easy for things to get very complicated fast and sometimes updates will break things. Having said that things are improving quickly but there is a learning curve. HA brings some very nice integrations that aren't readily available elsewhere.
HE is great for general device management and control and is VERY flexible in terms of development and integrations. Also the (this!) community is amazing - lot's of helpful folks willing to help out etc.
I've just recently redone my home setup - Instead of HE + NR and I am now running HE + HA + HA's NR Addon.. I've found doing it this way has given me even more cool possibilities.
In terms of HomeSeer (HS)- I think it's a toss up. I've never used it and haven't really heard anything really negative except maybe the total cost of ownership might be higher. I'm guessing you'd either want HS or HE but probably not both.
Home Assistant might do everything you need depending upon how willing you are to put up with some of the technical gotchas. You would also need to get usb sticks for Z-Wave & Zigbee etc based on what devices you want to control.
HE is really nice and simple when it comes to handling devices. You can also connect HE and HA via available community bridge apps.
Thanks for your quick reply @rlithgow1. So sorry, I thought I made it clear that it is not clear to me what/where I need to go. Let me start from where I am/was.
Got into automation several years ago, at the time landing solidly on Insteon as a clear choice for my needs. I liked the dual-band feature, and the selection of devices as well as the detailed configuration abilities.
Currently I have outside double switched receptacle controlling party lights and holiday lights, dimmers on all my other outdoor wall lights, everything inside is on dimmers, some single-point and two keypads - one for fan and other lighting and one for multiple lighting in the bedroom. I have embedded several micro dimmers into table lamps, and like the return-to-dim feature as well as the inter-operability with the keypads. Several schedules and scenes setup to use these all in nice fashion. These are things I would like to either keep or rebuild with other supported devices. the Q is which is easier, and best value for the future, since reconstructing will mean buying many new devices.
After reading the replies so far, it looks like making the bridge to Insteon will be a good investment of time, and I already have the micro PC to make usable for the HA integration with HE . Also sounds like Node Red is pretty cool and useful! Had not heard of it until now.
Thanks again, and I will def be bugging @SmartHomePrimer with more awesome info!
Makes sense. And if you go with Hubitat integration, you can continue expanding. (You can also use Rule Machine if you don't want to use node red). Hubitat is also 100% local, no cloud reliance.
Started with Wink. Simple, well supported (at the time), and supported a wide variety of products. Purchased and built a HomeSeer Pi as a second hub to try and expand my z-wave mesh to my detached garage. That's when I saw the complexities of z-wave and what was 'under the hood' of a simplified (Wink) user interface. This was about 4-5 years ago.
Wink went to the dark side, and I found HE. Haven't looked back since. Tech support is 2nd to none, and you can pretty much do anything you want. Great balance between a fairly simplified user interface, all the way to, if you can and want to write your own code for apps or drivers, you can. Or if you're like me and last wrote code in the 1980s, there's probably someone out there who can write it for you.
As for integrations (HA/etc), if you want that, you can do that too. I did some HA integration to try it out, but didn't find it was really necessary. I mainly use HE for voice integration with Alexa for turning lamps on/off/etc, and for remote locks and monitoring of rental properties, and both my parents and in-laws home.
Oh - and with the latest z-wave firmware update, z-wave is rock solid working better than ever.
As others have said above, what do you want this technology to do for you? You can almost certainly do it with HE!
Oh - and I haven't touched that HS Pi in probably about 3 years...
"Castle OS"? A valiant effort, but grossly over-promised and under-capitalized, I fear.
