Home Assistant or Hubitat or both?

I found this works better Xiaomi Miot Auto

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Simple automations like setting temp during Cleaning or Away modes. Other than that nothing really though do monitor updates from the ecobee sensors so I know when the batteries finally die since they no longer report temperatures. I do this externally via NodeRed and MariaDB.

I'm using that for my Qingping AQM Pro, but I don't need Xiaomi gateways for it. I guess you do since the locks are bluetooth? Too bad they can't communicate directly via bluetooth in HA with ESPHome extenders like Switchbot devices can.

Yeah shame. I think it is due to the security for the locks. You need the Xiaomi bluetooth hub to activate the locks with pin codes. The 3D X has wifi but that is for the door video but not the actual lock.

You may be able to bypass the Xiaomi hub altogether but I have not had the time to look into that.

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:point_up_2: This! :man_shrugging: :point_up_2:

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Here is my example of using HA in combination with Hubitat and Ecobee thermostats, in case anyone is interested. I make use of HA device bridge and Node Red.

Solar panels for heat pump power

Thanks to @SmartHomePrimer and several others who helped me get this started. :smiley:

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I use both so option 3 for me too.

I love Hubitat, its a great device and the backbone of my Smart home but I need HA to fill in the gaps and there are several including presence sensing which just doesn't work quickly enough in HE, no support for my EV charge point and very glitchy Honeywell Evo home TRV control. I also love the dashboard flexibility that HA provides too, its really good, perfect for our wall mounted auto-on dash.

I do also find the automations side of HA a lot easier to use than Rule Machine. The RM UI is just not very intuitive in my opinion.

From a technical view, this may be a good option. My concern is that my wife is a computer noob and when I will leave this planet she is completely lost with home automation. My kids are not interested in this stuff. So I will stay with just one system and no one in Luxembourg seems to use HE, but HA is more frequently used. In a year I will be retired and will create some videos, how to create a new system and to restore from a backup, how to replace a bulb or something else in the system. So multiple systems will just complicate the things.

Hopefully any videos you produce will be out-of-date by the time anyone needs to use them... so probably best to, slowly, get them up-to-speed with some of the basics of what is involved in a smart home, like an understanding of logic, basic networking concepts and some of the fundamentals like good practices borrowed from scientific methods for troubleshooting issues when they come up (small changes and testing their affects... etc).

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Hubitat is easier to manage (less hand holding and fewer updates )and the mesh radios are built in. I hardly ever do anything with it to be honest, it just runs all by itself so if you are going to stick with one system I would seriously consider going with HE.

The thing to remember though with my approach is that I can shut down home assistant and the smart home largely keeps going, automation wise at least. Hubitat controls all the lighting, our alarm and heating systems can operate independently via the manufacturers apps and our smoke alarms just switch to operating as dumb detectors.

Home Assistant just gives me another way of displaying, accessing and managing these systems outside of their manufacturers apps, within one UI.

You could run HA as a side system as I have done for greater flexibility but do so in a way that doesn't make it an essential part of the system if you are not around. That way your wife only has to learn how Hubitat works.

@user4935 - Like you alliude to, that does depend on how people have chosen or needed to use Home Assistant. For some, HA is not so much a convenience that they include alongside Hubitat, but more an add-on that adds to their capabilities that Hubitat provides. E.g. allowing connecting things like Aqara FP2's or IKEA devices not supported by HE.

I guess my point is it depends, which you to account for. Most definitely, for those who are in your situation, then yes, the education exercise is less complicated and can be more focused, but for others it can need to cover the HA setup as well.

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Not really. It took a lot of time to get it working like it does now. Rule Machine is powerful but not intuitive at all and all the glitches with editing and so on are a sometimes a nightmare. It happened more than once to me to start over with a new rule and deleting the old because editing finished in a mass of errors. HA is cleaner as long as you do not have to go to YAML. But all in all I begin to like the interface of HA more than HE. Also taking control with YAML is not so complicated and a fast learning curve, much documented in Google, YouTube, and the forums. But back to my wife :wink: HA is more system independent. She could by a HA Green or a Mini PC. As long as I leave her an installer and the instructions how to install and restore from a cloud backup, this is covered. My kids can help with instructions. Most times she will have to change a bulb and by using the friendly names in automations, she just has to integrate a new one with the same name (some easy steps required). All this can be done by 8–10 videos and does not change much. I could simply do a new video for major changes. She will not continue to extend the system like I do.

Another point that makes me think that HA is the better choice is the platform. HA has Matter and Thread and Matter works on all systems and Thread on all systems with a correct Thread Radio (easy to add). HE forces users to upgrade to a C-8 and that is at least for Matter just a commercial choice. There is no reason why a C-7 can not get an update to Matter. For the radios, I don't know, but over HomeKit a HomePod can act as radio.

I have 2 C-7, one working and one in the shelf for the case of a break. I will have to buy 2 C-8 hubs for the same logic. Why ? For HA, in the case that I switch, I will install HA in an UTM Virtual Machine on my Mac. In case of a hardware break, I will just connect the antennas (actually on a portable USB hub) to my Mac, do a restore of the latest backup and my Smart Home works until I get a new dedicated hardware.

No one is forced to use matter devices. Personally I have no intention of buying any in the near future.

And of course there is a reason why they didn’t also roll out matter support in the C7 at the same time as the C8. There are key differences under the hood that could have required a great deal of duplication of effort to ensure compatibility with the C7.

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There is a difference between configuration which is what creating automations in rule machine is, and management which is keeping a working system going.

Once setup and working "Properly" Hubitat is easier to manage because there are far fewer updates. HA updates come thick and fast, we have at least three this month alone, two core and a supervisor update. Terminal has also been updated this month. That's four lots of management where Hubitat required none.

If you think your wife will be ok with the 35 plus updates a year that come with HA go for it, its a brilliant system for sure, I love HA. But if you are worried about her ability or willingness for that matter to want to keep HA running, HE is easier from a hands off perspective.

As is every single product decision

A HA major architectural issue is making entity names database keys. It makes the product brittle.

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My brother passed away recently and left things in a lot of disarray for my sister in-law and niece. So this has me tightening things up so that the system can, to the best of my ability, self-recover after a power outage with no intervention. It mostly does that right now, but there are a few things I'm upgrading to fill in some gaps. My wife isn't a noob, but I'm not going to fool myself that she will try and figure any of this out when I'm gone and similarly my son wouldn't likely want to either.

Most lights have smart switches can be operated manually. There are a few overhead lights with smartbulbs that need Hubitat to bridge the Lutron Smart Bridge Pro so that Picos can be used, so as long as that and the Hue bridge keep going, things will keep working. She could use the Hue app if only the Hue bridge were to survive me, but likely won't remember that if that situation arises. With the exception of some Osram Garden Spots, HA only handles sensors and some convenience integratiions. Nothing mission critical to lights, locks or primary heating control.

Beyond that, I have told her to just get an electrician in and convert it all back to regular switches. While my family likes the conveniences, they would be happy to just live with lights that get left on all the time, doors that sit unlocked, heat burning money like there's no tomorrow, etc.

I'm new to HA and may not know enough about it, but in HE device swapping was a true problem before they installed a feature that is well hidden to swap devices.

In HA I think, with my limited knowledge, that you can do it two ways.

  1. You simply use a good text editor to find and replace devices in YAML (text based code). A fast and easy operation.
  2. Avoid using device IDs in automations and use entity IDs instead. Normally, when renaming entity IDs (Device IDs can't be renamed) from your new device to the old ones, your automations continue to work as expected.

But, I may be wrong.

Edit : Just wondering why nobody worked on that (plugin, etc.) as it is so easy to swap names in YAML code ...

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I was a long time Hubitat user, with a C5 and now a C8. This past spring I installed Home Assistant. While HA is not perfect, for me, it's vastly superior in almost every way to Hubitat. However, what Hubitat does better is Zigbee/Z-wave. I have about 15 Z-wave devices on Hubitat that you couldn't pay me enough to move to HA. But, I've since deleted ALL automations on Hubitat and merely use it as a 'dumb' bridge to Z-wave devices.

This spring I'll be dumping all the Z-wave switches and replacing them with Thread/Matter. So once all Z-wave is gone, so will be the Hubitat C8. Hubitat was a nice stepping stone from Smarthings, but I can do 100x more in Home Assistant and haven't needed to learn YAML or Node Red. 98% of what I do in there is point and click via the UI.

Case in point, are Home Assistant blueprints for my lights. There is community developer (Blacky) that has this simply amazing light automation blueprint that is entirely configured via the UI. It has so many options and features that I don't think you could ever touch that with RM or Webcore. And he constantly updates it, and with one click I can pull down his latest version and my two dozen automations instantly use his updated code. From dynamic lighting, night lights, conditional triggers, sunrise/sunset azimuth, and so much more it's simply stunning what he has done.

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With VS Code you can search/replace in multiple files at once. So it's pretty quick and painless to do a mass replace. Should they do that behind the scenes, yes. But manual is not hard. Plus, there's an add-on called Watchman which scans all your config files for orphans. So finding orphans is one click.

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