What you need to understand about Homebridge or HomeKit integration in Home Assistant is they are open source based on the non-commercial version of HomeKit Accessory Protocol (HAP).
Apple can stop supporting HomeKit anytime they want, and the lack of that native integration would make it a whole lot less attractive. But they cannot stop what is entirely local from working. They’d have to turn to litigation to stop what they themselves have already allowed.
Hey just thought of something. Say I use a caseta dimmer and fan control on my wall. But want to control them both from a pico by my bed, standard for light, long press for fan, that means there will be a delay? How bad is it?
If you want to use only one Pico to control both fan and light, you would integrate the Pico with Hubitat, but not directly associate the Pico to the Lutron switch/dimmer/fan controller. That way Hubitat can detect a press vs a hold, and control the light with the press, and the fan with a hold.
If you find there is a delay, you can always just use two Picos. Associate one Pico directly to the Light and the other Pico directly to the fan.
I could just eat the delay and do the short/long press, just don’t use the lutron app at all? How bad is the delay? I’m trying to figure out if I should do it or keep 2 picos on my bed
The delay is typically less than 1 second. Is it perceptible, sure. But it is really not a problem for 99% of users.
The issue is caused by the fact that the Pico remote is transmitting for a while to make sure its message is received by the Caseta SmartBridge Pro. So, even though Hubitat has already received the Pico data and processed it, the command back to the SmartBridge Pro to turn on a Caseta switch/dimmer has to wait until the Pico stops monopolizing the Lutron Clear Connect RF network.
I'd say it depends which Pico driver you're using. For the "Fast Pico" driver I'd agree. But you don't get the "hold" functionality with the "Fast" driver. The regular Pico driver adds a configurable delay to detect if a button is being held. I believe the default is 1 second but it's configurable from 250ms to 2 seconds in preset increments of 250, 300, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000ms.
Ironically the delays only happen with Lutron switches/dimmers when controlled via Hubitat. As stated above by @ogiewon, Picos are a transmit only device and will jam up communications with the bridge. That issue can be managed by either 1) not controlling the dimmer via Hubitat (keep the Pico paired with the dimmer in the Lutron app), or 2) use scenes on the Lutron bridge. The bridge is a giant button device with 99 buttons. Using a scene means only 1 message needs to get through to control more than 1 dimmer/switch.
Makes sense. I only use the picos for simple stuff (setting lights on/off, setting specific color, dim level, etc). So hit a button as I walk by.
I used to have delay issues back in the 2.2.3 days (I think it was 2.2.3?) before HE started limiting the event log and database sizes dropped and everything got a lot faster.
