I’ve finally made the commitment to go all in on HE after moving from Android to iOS and hating how many apps I need to do everything.
I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment and not sure where to start, what’s worth keeping, and what’s worth replacing. Any advice?
Kasa RGB light strips & dimmable switches
MyQ garage door opener
Chromecast via Sony Bravia TVs
Aqara temp and humidity sensor (zigbee)
Aqara motion sensor (zigbee)
Aqara water sensor (zigbee)
Hunter simpleconnect fans (doubt this exists)
The goal is to reduce the amount of apps I need to turn stuff on and off, and to start automating the every day things I do with the help of the sensors.
And, hopefully, find a way to get all of the devices into HomeKit and Google Home so my wife and I can control them from our phones.
Any advice on where to get started? I’m feeling so lost!!
There's also a built in Chromecast app that offers the basics for controlling a device. Looking at Bryan's Chromecast Helper, he mentions that there is a new setting as of 2.2.8.141 to keep the connection alive, which had been a problem in the past, so worth looking at that when setting it up (reminder to myself as well... ).
For your Aqara devices you may need to look at these Community drivers, however I don't believe they are supported anymore by the developer, or at least have only limited support.
Use the hubitat dashboards to pull them all into one interface and control them. Then just pin the dashboard to your homescreen and it will feel like a native app. Then you won't need separate apps for all the devices.
You have a lot of wifi devices. Not sure how many of the kasa switches (which I believe all runn of wifi) you have, but if you have issues with them you may have to look into ensuring your wifi is strong. I had wifi switches before and ended up switching them all out for zwave switches. Started being a pain as the numbers grew.
MyQ integration has to poll the servers to get open/close status. I try to reduce any polling like that on my hub as its just extra cpu utilization that adds up as you add more and more. You can reduce that by using zwave tilt sensors like the ecolinks so it only has to contact the myq servers to update its token and execute the open/close commands. You only really need to worry about this type of thing though if you start to have issues with cpu etc on the hub. But keep it in mind.
With the Aqara stuff be careful. If you have issues with them dropping off it could be a repeater (which it doesn't look like you have) or distance/interference. If you have to add repeaters keep in mind not all play nice with aqaura. The Ikea repeaters are great though.
Mine are still working (with 99% reliability - occasionally I do get a dropout) with these drivers but have not upgraded to 2.2.8 yet although I don't expect anything to change.
Plus one for the Ikea repeaters from me as well, I have them dotted around the house and bulbs and sensors seem to gravitate towards those more than the Samsung plugs I have in the same location. Even tried turning the HE hub off yesterday to try and get them to associate with what I thought were the more powerful repeaters, but they still chose the Ikea's.
Does look like they have moved the repeater back into the power plug part of the device, which is a shame, the one's I have atm seem to have the repeater in an attachment to this, allowing you to plus the repeater into a USB socket if you want, not that I have done that yet.
I don't believe so, I think the images on the Aust site have omitted showing this as the assembly instructions on the site still show a 2 piece repeater.
I'll probably order one of the tiny Tuya zigbee repeaters from Aliexpress for testing as @aaiyar says they work great (and are super small - smaller than a flash drive).
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