Hub Connect vs Hub Link vs (NEW) Hub Mesh

After the announcement yesterday of Hub Mesh, just wondering how it is going to compare to Hub Connect and the older Hub Link.

Looking forward to playing with Hub Mesh to see what its capabilities are.

Hub Mesh is meant for local hubitat to hubitat connections that don't need to be routed to a different subnet. HubConnect still has it's place for connecting to disjointed hubs or from other manufacturers such as ST.

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The biggest difference is that it's a totally different approach, requiring no built-in (like Hub Link) or custom (like HubConnect) apps or drivers to work: they use magic that only Hubitat can do at the hub firmware level to just basically mirror the same device on the other hub. In other words, it's not an app-and-driver-based approach as everything has been so far (and as pretty much any community option must be). Custom devices work with no special consideration, all device logging appears on both hubs, and so on. On a technical side, it also appears to work via mulitcast, meaning if you send the same device to multiple hubs, it's probably only one transmission (I have not verified this). There are some other minor things too (one of which I don't actually like in comparison), but I'm hesitant to say too much in case they change it during further testing, so I'm just saying what I think is consistent with the demo last night. :slight_smile:

But as mentioned above, there are some things it can't do at the moment and likely never will (ST, cloud-to-cloud hubs, etc). HubConnect also has a documented API some integrations could theoretically use, though I'm not aware of anything besides another one from the HubConnect author that does (a Netatmo Weather integration).

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As @bertabcd1234 said, I see HubConnect still filling a role with integrating systems outside of the HE environment.

What I am looking forward to with Hub Mesh are:

  1. It’s native with nothing to install.
  2. It supports all devices and all attributes
  3. It appears to be peer to peer rather than master and slaves. While I have been architecting my hubs so that they are all mostly self contained, there is always some reliance on the one master hub to work. In one case I have a device on one slave that needs to be available on another slave so that one is currently synched to the master and then to the other slave. With Hub Mesh I should be able to go straight between the hubs in a mesh-like fashion.

Please correct me if I am wrong. I have had no other experience with Hub Mesh than from what was said at Hubitat Live yesterday.

Looking forward to this so I can put my C3 to work with my C7 with little work as possible.

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That's how I'd classify it, as well. HubConnect technically doesn't need to be that way either--"server" and "remote" are more or less arbitrary designations, and one hub's "remote" and be another's "server" (just install it) with no need to send everything to a "central" hub if not otherwise needed. But with Hub Mesh, if you mark a device as "shareable," it's available to any hub on your LAN with nothing more required besides choosing to add it to the other hub(s). And if my above assumption is correct, this would still be different in that you'd get multicast rather than two subscriptions (one per app) as in the other configuration...though I'm not sure I have enough things shared between hubs to care. :slight_smile:

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Ohh the work of starting from scratch and rewriting rules on 3 hubs. I just designed around hubconnect, but this looks so much better.

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I'm curious why someone would need three hubs.

Also, if I want to setup a second hub on the same LAN for testing new Rules, Devices, firmware, etc. should I use Connect, Link, or Mesh?

The one requirement I can think of at the moment is that I would want to be able to control all (production) devices from both hubs.

Most people will need only one hub, but there are many reasons to have multiple (multiple buildings, RF unfriendly architecture, desire to logically separate devices, development vs production, etc.). As to which method to use to connect, if both are on the same LAN segment Hub Mesh is generally the easiest to setup and maintain (set and forget).

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I have a guest house/office that i didn't want the z wave to hop that far. And then i had a C-4 Hub that had my nest thermostat linked and they deprecated the nest driver so i cant move it to a new hub. So now i have one for each house and one hub for all network devices like weather, smart tv's, etc.

That's pretty much automatic and almost the entire intent.

The entire intent of what?

... of HubLink, HubConnect and HubMesh.

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