Home Remote dashboard for Hubitat

[AndyM]

A general post about the current state of this project:

Home Remote, designed by someone wholly unrelated to me, is chugging along great with new features being added all the time. I'm still actively using and promoting it.

I originally worked on this code, with the developer of Home Remote, to get a connection between Hubitat and Home Remote after switching from SmartThings. Code is not my specialty! But I was motivated to get my dashboards back up after moving to HE.

The main issue with this integration is that it is using HTTP to connect. Using this code, Home Remote gets its status updates by constantly polling the hub. This can put a strain on your hub, however, does work well and is snappy in a lot of cases cases - such as if you want to access the system from outside your network or if you only have a limited number of devices you are trying to control. This code worked really well for me for a while with an always on dashboard - then I multiplied the number of always on dashboards I was running and dramatically increased the number of devices being polled (100+).

I have currently switched to using MQTT as the connector between Home Remote and Hubitat. MQTT has it's downfalls as well - The first is that the MQTT broker / server needs to be run on a separate always-on device to act as a middleman between Hubitat and Home Remote. The second downfall is you'll have to figure out on your own how to get some form of secure out of home access (I'm using a VPN). The huge benefit of MQTT is that it doesn't constantly poll the hub, nor does Home Remote need to constantly parse the poll data coming back from the hub. The MQTT code only "activates" on state changes of the selected devices, sending status updates without the need for polling.

For anyone trying to set this up using MQTT, I would highly suggest @kevin's MQTT app:

[OLD] MQTT app beta1 and pre beta2 - please use beta3 thread

It's been a long wait but I have, at last, released my mqtt app as an open beta 1 this weekend. It's still evolving and although it won't win any coding awards it is pretty feature complete and stable I hope. It's been through 5 major alpha releases and numerous smaller updates with over a hundred alpha testers although feedback has been very limited saddeningly. For those in the smaller alpha testers groups - thank you so much for your feedback, it's been invaluable ..There maybe a few b…

and then you'll need the MQTT plugin script:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/thehomeremote/h4ACSLVidjw
(see the February 12th post with the example as an attachment)

I am still interested in keeping the HTTP code working as well, but as I'm not using it I often won't realize something has broken - nor does it get top priority. If you see any issues, or have updates to the code please let me know. After loading up this code tonight I see there are at least 2 issues that need correcting:

1. The latest version of Home Remote assigns templates automatically, so that part of the plugin script can be deleted
2. For a color bulb, switch,level and color temp are working, however color is not. I believe something has changed on the Home Remote side, which should be easily fixed in the plugin script.

I'll put these two on the to-do list, if anyone else gets to the first, please share!