Yesterday on Reddit, i stumbled a cross a beautiful smart home app called Ovio. it appears it is only available to Home Assistant (though I did float the idea with the Dev that I would guinea pig it on Hubitat if they are interested). Someone had suggested setting up Home Assistant and using a Hubitat plug in? How difficult would this be to set up? I really wouldn't be using HA for anything else. I assume all the "work" of the automations , etc. is still being done on my hubs, correct? Des anyone have any thoughts or insights on this?
IMHO Home Assistant installation and maintenance seems like a lot of overhead if you can get the app working on Hubitat.
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That is why I'm hoping I can get them to just make it available to Hubitat. For giggles I tried to connect it to my hub last night, just to see if it would, and it doesn't find it. If it was just a set up and forget it thing to use home assistant for this one thing, I might be inclined to try it, but if its going to take a lot of effort to keep it going, I'm not going to be so inclined.
Have you communicated with the authors of Ovio at all? It may be that they'd support Hubitat if someone gave them the idea and offered to help with testing etc
Yes, I replied to the thread on Reddit and asked if it was. They (I am assuming it was the dev) said not currently "but it could be useful", to which I replied I would be willing to help in anyway I can (which would pretty much be just being a guinea pig). On the chance that WSAN'T the dev I was responding to, I also sent a message this morning to the email listed on their web page offering the same.
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Depends on how good you are with linux / docker / and or raspberry pi hardware... I find it super simple to setup, but all of that is in my wheel house... It might not be in yours, so that's hard to answer.
I do almost zero manual control of devices, and almost never do it from my phone in favor of voice or laptop dashboards. But for someone that uses their phone for manual control a lot the app might be neat. It is stylish, I'll give them that. It just fixes a problem that I don't have.
Side note, it would take them a TREMENDOUS amount of work to port it from HA to Hubitat (there are so many paradigms that simply work very differently in HAs api versus Hubitat's MakerAPI), so unless they think there is a big market to monetize it after the beta, it might not happen.
(side side note - I also don't like how they say it is 'free during the beta' and don't say what it will cost after the beta....)
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Honestly, I've never tried any of it. I'm guessing Raspberry Pi would be the most likely/ simplest?
While I am trying to get into more strict automation, we have one room , our bedroom where at my current skill level its not practical (at least not if I want to continue sleeping in my own bed). My wife is amazingly tolerant of my HA experimentation, but Alexa was causing issues with our bedroom lights a few months ago and I've had it turned off for HA since. I think it had something to do with "hunches" but I haven't dug too deeply into it yet. I am about to embark on a new level of automation, we'll see how well that goes over. I may end up sleeping in the dog cage before its done.
Personally,. I use dashboards more for monitoring things than operating them (if that makes sense. Personallly, one thing I do still use it for is operating the garage door. My clicker in the car doesn't work (I would not automate it to open on presence anyway) and I don't fully trust that it will close on presence, so I still tend to use the app to close it .
I just really think that app looks very nice, it think a lot of other Hubitat users would be interested in seeing it come to this platform as well. We'll see if they take me up on my offer.
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Probably. If you can find one to buy - they are a bit more scarce during the chip shortage. Would need the rpi, storage, and probably a case. So $50-$100 by the time you get everything.
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Can they run on POE?
Only if you buy a POE expansion hat for the RPi - another $20-30.
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It can all be done, and connecting Hubitat to HA is the easiest part of it all - once it is all setup.
Just a reasonable amount of work if starting from scratch unless you are pretty sure you are going to use that app a lot.
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I set up HA on an RPI w/Conbee Zigbee dongle recently as a way to bring reluctant Zigbee devices into HE...if you set HA up the "normal" way it means dedicating the RPI to only being your HA server. I set HA up as "supervised" so that I could use the RPI for other stuff as well...
However, the first time HA updated after the initial setup (during a normal apt update), the update broke something in HA. 
Had to search out the error message and make changes to an HA config file. That cleared the error so I could access the HA UI again.
So I'm understandably underwhelmed w/HA ease of use so far... 
I'm more of a "cookbook" RPI/HA user, so I'm not the guy who's going to troubleshoot and solve Home Assistant problems on my own, which HA leans into AFAIC.
Basic RPI kit on CanaKit (reliable RPI vendor) is about $100 for a Pi4/2GB w/32GB SD card and power supply. But they (and likely most non-gouging RPI sources) are out of stock - CanaKit is not shipping until October 30.
How about I sell you my Pi4/8GB for $500. 
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It's really easy to set up with home assistant blue. Its basically plug and play but it will cost you $150.
If you use a raspberry pi you just have to write the software to an SD card. If you've ever done anything with a raspberry pi such as wireguard or home bridge it won't be too difficult.
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Also, AFAIK the Hubitat Home Assistant plug-in is about bringing in devices that are paired on Home Assistant into HE, to control them in HE.
Not sure how using that app will help w/using the Ovio app, as it seems like the Ovio app would require that all of your devices are paired w/Home Assistant.
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There's also a Hubitat integration in Home Assistant that allows you to bring all your devices over to Home Assistant.
On a side note. I tried the Ovio app and it's a nice looking UI like an Apple designed app. It would make a great dashboard for sure. However, I like using the stock UI in Home Assistant because it allows you to fit a lot more switches and devices on a page. It's great when I quickly want to check on the status of various lights before bed at night.
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OK, thanks. hadn't seen that one...
FWIW, Blue has been out of stock for 7-8 months. Although Odroid N2+ SBCs (the hardware Blue is based on) can still be purchased relatively easily.
The absolute simplest way to try this is on a spare computer. It is dead simple to get Home Assistant running in about 20 minutes or less with VirtualBox.
Windows
MacOS
You don’t need Linux or Docker knowledge. If you like the results, you could later switch to a Raspberry Pi if you want. That too is very simple. There’s an image already created for you that runs the Home Assistant OS, just like they use for the VirtualBox setup. Again, no Linux required. Just have to image a microSD card and you pop it in and boot the RPi to Home Assistant. Super easy.
The Home Assistant Device Bridge integration is a cake walk. You’ll be able to bring in devices that create entities in HA into HE as long as there’s a matching Generic Conponent Device type in the HE driver list.
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Though he will need to go the other way, HE devices into to HA, to use the app he likes.
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Right. I noticed that just as I had to put the phone down. Thanks for pointing that out. 
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