To a certain extent.
In my personal opinion, the whole pairing zwave process HAS gotten much better.
(I just did a pairing of a new device to confirm my suspicions...)
At the beginning, I have to agree with you, that it was dreadful! However, it does seem to have improved immensely.
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Agreed.
I have so modified my original response.
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Agreed. I was there when the C-7 was introduced. Mine sat in its box for a few months until the original disaster subsided, and I kept using my C-5 until pairing was more tolerable.
There are a few things (S2) that the C-7 does better than the C-5, but the pairing process is still not as good as on the C-5. And, there are still some devices (power measurement) that only work on the C-5, and will bring down the mesh on a C-7.
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Plus way fewer breaking changes every few days.
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In the old days, IBM (big iron) would NEVER denigrate an opponents products.
However, they would cleverly TALK UP their advantages to their opponents disadvantages.
It was one of the reasons why they were so successful in those days.
(I once got a Cross pen for signing one of their contracts!)
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I run an integrated Home Assistant / hubitat hybrid setup.
All of my zigbee and z-wave devices are paired with 2 hubitat hubs. The "child" hub (c-4) shares it's devices back to the "parent" (c-7) via hub mesh. These devices are then all shared out from the parent to Home Assistant via MQTT. Most ip based devices (media players, thermostats, etc) are controlled directly from Home Assistant.
Home Assistant, Mosquitto, and Appdaemon all run containerized from docker-compose on a linux box in my basement. All of my automations are written in python with appdaemon using a real text editor (yay!) and stored in git (yay!).
It's not quite as simple as all this. I'm also using hubitat's alexa integration, since it's free and the home assistant one has a recurring cost. In the interest of speed, I also leverage hubitat groups and scenes quite a bit, since it's faster to send a single mqtt command to turn on 1 virtual switch and have hubitat manage all the member devices, than to try to send an mqtt command for each one. That brings me to my final speed tweak, which is that in some of my appdaemon apps I bypass Home Assistant and interact with MQTT directly.
All in all I've reached a state that is stable and performant using this setup.
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For geeks like us that want to play with all the stuff and not have any limit, a hybrid is really nice.
For the average user that doesn't want to play, they just want functionality, keep it to a single hub, or no more than two HE hubs connected by Hub Mesh. Deal with the limitations of device support, and realize that Hubitat isn't alone in this. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and IP devices simply don't work equally across hubs and bridges. Matter isn't going to change things as much as people believe. I can already see the lines being drawn between the manufactures that are pretending to cooperate with each other.
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A quick glance on their community forum indicates very similar issues to what I've seen here - devices not pairing, hubs going offline, dashboard issues ... all the usual fun stuff. Home automation is not a simple thing no matter how hard a company tries to make it seem so.
Since it's not available in the US afaik, still on the 500 series Z-Wave chipset (I think?) and very expensive I'll stick with my very affordable, reliable and flexible Hubitat + Node-RED combination.
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They have problems yes. Mostly related to 3rd party apps. If you stay with all the manufacturers different apps it’s a lot more stable. Their biggest problem tough is that many people have reported poor connection with devices and have been forced to modify their hubs with 3rd party hardware to correct this.
Their still on the 500 chip and indeed Homey is very expensive. Those two factors among other things whas what made me choose Hubitat.
What I do miss that Homey has is the abillity to communicate with most of the Wifi and bluetooth stuff out there and their graphical interface. Homey is a bit more plug ’n play and user friendly than Hubitat if you are not a very skilled user. Those two things is something I would like to se in Hubitat in the near future. Also I miss some european stuff that doesnt work with Hubitat yet.
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As an owner/user of both Homey and Hubitat I can say that Hubitat is a much more solid and reliable platform.
Yes Homey has BlueTooth (kind of) and a nice graphic UI and I would say it's a little easier for new users UX. However Athom are appalling at listening to users, responding and fixing bugs and leave their community users alienated. Even their own inbuilt apps have long standing bugs with no fixes.
Hubitat are so much more responsive and fix things quickly and that is an overriding reason to choose their controller. It's also easier to code for - however Athom win the better technical documentation accolade by a long way.
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Do you mean developer documentation? I'm just looking at the getting started documentation and it's pretty sparse. There are videos, but that's not documentation. Can you point me to what you like from them? Genuinely curious to see an example of what you find better.
I don't like posting about competing products on other manufacturers websites - but hopefully it will help improve information.
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Very interesting to read this thread and your post in particular.
I am landing on a very similar setup where I have all my zwave/zigbee devices in HE, but have started to integrate other (ip/wifi) devices in HA, and use a mix of HE and Node-Red for automations.
I do notice you’reusing MQTT to share devices with HA, though. I am using the Hubitat community integration in HA, which relies on MakerAPI. While it was easy to set up, I am having trouble getting my zigbee/zwave devices to properly notify their state changes to HA, which means they often get out of sync in HA dashboards.
Just curious to know if you’re finding MQTT to be more reliable that way.
Also, has anyone experienced similar issues with the MakerAPI HE-HA integration?
Thanks
I've noticed that my HE Hub mode does not always get reflected properly in HA.
This morning HE was in Day mode while HA said it was still in Night mode.
I did have an issue at one point where if I was too quick with light setting changes via a HA dashboard, I would see JSON errors on the HA side.
I just tried it again and it's working fine now.
Not sure if that was a HA issue, Maker API issue, or a bit of everything.
Keen to hear who has moved ZigBee devices to home assistant? My hubitst hub is old and I'm looking to upgrade. I have a syn Nas ready to run it all. I only have ZigBee devices for motion and blinds and locks . And then lifx no z wave at all
DSM 7 dropped USB support so unless you’re staying on 6…
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Good to know. Quick search shows there's work arounds tho.
Everything is pulled apart now until we move into the new house, but just prior I had moved all my Xiaomi devices to HA with a ConBee 2 and used HA Device Bridge to bring them back into HE where Rule Machine and Basic Rules are a pleasure to work with.
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