HE Newbie Questions- No Hub Experience

Hello all. I recently purchased the Hubitat Hub, which will be arriving tomorrow. I currently have 3 Google mini's, Hue RGB starter light kit, Nest & Harmony hub. Since I do not currently have a hub, my devices are all connected to the Google assistant. My question is do I need to remove my devices from the Google assistant and then connect them to HE? And then connect the Google assistant to HE for control?

Sorry for the newbie question & I am excited about diving into the HA with HE.

Thanks

Connect your devices to Hubitat and then connect to Google Assistant. That way, when Google Assistant makes the change by your voice, Hubitat knows about it. Therefore the device state is known for an automation on Hubitat to be able to control the device as well, and stay in sync. Not to mention the fact that you’re buying a system that runs local so it makes no sense to run things in the cloud that can run local. Local means you have control regardless of your Internet connection or the cloud servers.

Because Google assistant is all cloud based, it will depend on your devices whether or not they can be connected directly to Hubitat.

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Thanks for the reply. I will disconnect the devices and start from scratch to connect everything to the hub. I am sure I will have a few more questions. The forum has been great and very helpful.

Thanks

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Welcome to Hubitat. I hope you have a great experience! If you need any help, this is the place to go for it.

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Sorry this isn't correct all of the devices he mentioned are cloud device and are not directly connected to the hub only though the intrigrations. The only difference is the hue stuff which is local via its bridge.

Only remove the hue and harmony stuff from Google assistant.

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OK replied in haste from my phone. So yes, some are going to be cloud only, but not Hue. @dago5252 You have a Hue starter kit. I don't know what this means exactly, but it has to at least include a Hue Bridge and Hue color bulb. So that can be controlled by the Hubitat Hue Integration, which means that control of the Hue Bridge will be via your local IP. No need for cloud control, but devices like Google Home can still control it via the cloud. It's still going to be better to connect the Hue Bridge to Hubitat via the Hue Integration and then control it via Google Home by connecting Google Home to Hubitat. Otherwise, it does work without connecting Google Home to Hubitat, but the status updates are slow due to the Hue cloud connection.

Nest Integration is coming. Some have it, but there were limited slots available when it was first released. I don't think the Hubitat team ever fathomed that Google, or Alphabet or whomever is responsible for approving this integration for everyone to use, would be as slow as they have been. It's not Hubitat limiting it. However, if you sign up for a developer account, you can get that integration working. Just need to talk to support if you're up to the extra steps needed to get that working.

Harmony has no official integration at this time. There are community methods and workarounds. Several of them. Do some searching of the forum and decide which suites you best. Personally, I don't integrate my harmony with Hubitat. Personal choice. I sometimes watch movies or TV with lights on, sometimes they're off. I prefer to choose what I want and then just tell my voice assistant to do it, or I just use the Xiaomi button I have in my living room to set the lights.

If there are other devices you have not mentioned, please let the community know and someone will reply with a suggestion or opinion.

Thanks for clearing the air. I received my HE yesterday and start tinkering. The Hue system I have consists of a bridge & 3 RGB bulbs for now. I was able to add the Hue to HE, but I have no color control. I did some searching and found a script. I was able to somehow install via tamper monkey, but that was pure luck. The problem is I do not know how to get the color change option to my dashboard. I know this is going to be a learning curve for me, but I am excited about the experiment. Is there a way to schedule my Hue lights to come on a couple of hours in the morning & a couple of hours in the evening? I don't know if I need to schedule 2 lighting rules to accomplish this goal.

In the meantime, I left the Harmony hub & Nest connected to my Google assistant since there is currently no integration. I was also able to connect my Denon X4400H, but the buttons do not do anything. I need to confirm I set it up correctly.

Thanks for the help

There actually are Hubitat integrations for both Nest (official from Hubitat, but you need your own Nest Dev Account currently) and Logitech Harmony Hub (via my community developed integration for Activities).

This doesn't mean that I would recommend removing the native integrations from your Google Assistant/Home devices though. Those are very nicely engineered and supported official integrations. It can get confusing when the same devices are being presented to Google Home or Amazon Alexa devices from multiple sources. You just need to remember how it is all "wired together" between the various systems to avoid confusion and possible endless loops! :wink: