I came over to Hubitat after bad experiences with cloud automation

[dbhosttexas]

Long time, or even those that have been here more than a month have seen me. This post welcomes you, but you are not the intended audience.

I am writing this as information for those that are still in panic mode after Samsung announced they were shutting down certain Smartthings hardware, including barely broken in ADT Smartthings systems.

If you are on Smartthings, you probably know me from my Iris to Smartthings migration stories. Well Smartthings did it to me too. Yay...

When I moved to Smartthings Hubitat existed, but I recall there not yet being support for my carried over Iris V1 devices. No keypad, everyone was depending on dashboards and a tablet for controlling the system, particularly home monitoring / alarm function.

Those were absolute deal breakers for me at that time...

Those items were on the quick to do list, but just weren't ready yet.

I should have waited.

Seriously, I made a massive mistake not coming directly to Hubitat...

With one massive exception, and I don't blame HE for it, I blame the devices for the problem, and they are problematic on EVERY system they are compatible with, more detail later. But aside from those pain in the tail devices, getting set up was massively easier than ADT Smartthings.

Pairing devices. With the above noted exception, all devices, no matter Zigbee or Zwave, even the funny Iris V1 Zigbee implementation, was almost hands free.

No joke. Follow the MFGs factory reset and join instructions, replacing Hubitat for whatever the target system was.

Pairing in ADT Smartthings for me was painful, devices simply took forever to identify and initialize on ST, like a minimum of 5 minutes per the dual branded sensors. Just basically super slow.

Hubitat Elevation however. Click on Zigbee pairing, select the specific type and go. For example the Iris V1 contact sensors took a grand total of 10 seconds each. The V2 motion sensors were roughly the same... Nothing except for the upcoming complaint devices paired within 30 seconds.

Setting up automations, and predefined automations were every bit as easy as ST, and WAY more powerful / flexible. Now some things like my Iris V2 keypad integration wasn't super straight forward because I honeslty misread the screen, but once I reread it and allowed it to make sense I was done configuring...

Now the devices that caused me problems.

Hampton Bay Universal Wink Enabled Ceiling Fan Controller. These are Zigbee devices that were marketed for the Wink platform, and they are flaky. Factory resets on them are VERY difficult, and they flat out will make you lose your sanity trying to get them onto the network. I had trouble with them on Smartthings, I have problems with them on Hubitat Elevation. Sorry I didn't have them on Iris...

Unlike Smartthings, Hubitat had the drivers already there. No custom code required. And they MUCH more frequently went offline.

My fix was dumb but it worked and that was simply to power the hub off, bring it back up and let it rediscover the Zigbee mesh .

Mind you, rebooting the Smartthings hub was not an unheard of procedure.

So far though, no loss of service because the cloud junk went offline for maintenance. I get offered updates and I can accept, postpone, or decline. Nothing is forced on me.

So if you are like me, and have gotten booted off of Smartthings as Samsung pulls support for their hardware, but you want to be able to use your hardware, you want a platform that operates locally? You want a platform with a fantastic community that will help you over the rough spots. Well...

Come on in, the water's fine.

[1449smarthomeautomat]

I literally have been doing this over the last several days. I've got about 150 devices moved but I'm far from having everything.

There's a couple missing integrations that I'd need to be as integrated as I was into smartthings but I'll take the shortcomings if it means I have platform stability, which is what drove me over the edge. Also, through my journey from ST to HA and HE, I know enough to fill in the gaps with temporary solutions in the meantime.

Already speaking WebCore language really made my transition easier because I didn't have to learn a new platform to automate, especially working with core critical functionality/automations. I've definitely seen some settings and configurations in HE that I'm excited to get into.

Overall, I'm very pleased with it. If I'm being honest, this is my second crack at hubitat. I put it down 30 days after I bought it over a year ago because it was more DIY than I was looking for. With the knowledge I learned on ST over the years, it helped me be successful this time.

I'm glad you got your smarthome moved. I know the migration can be daunting for a NUMBER of reasons, meanwhile you're still trying to keep the house functional in the process.

I agreed with pretty much everything you said👍

[dbhosttexas]

Oddly enough, yeah, HE did come across as pretty in the weeds DIY when I first looked at it, but when I dove into it, after having to fight with getting DTHs to work in Smartthings, I actually found the transition as they say, six of one, half a dozen of the other. Meaning somethings on Smartthings are way easier. The guided pre canned apps are so easy even a caveman can do it as it were. HOWEVER once you steer off a little bit to the side ST got to be a real pain in the tail, basic operations were super slow, and the platform being cloud centric was just unreliable.

I was getting sensors throwing themselves offline for no apparent reason with no fix other than the un pair, then pair them, re add them to any automations etc... The dual branded stuff would just stop responding period and nothing sort of a factory reset would get them to play nice, ever, and then they would be online for less than a week and go offline.

Overall it was not a good experience by me.

Other than the Hampton Bay controllers, which are notorious no matter the platform, and honestly, they were only slightly worse by me here only because they didn't want to reset. Once they got into pairing mode and of course got Zigbee stable, it's been easy as Raspberry Pi.

Aside from my incoming Iris V3 smart plugs, I am at a stopping point hardware wise while I stuff aside budget for the next phases of adding Zwave dimmers and bulbs, pulling smart bulbs out. Yay fun. I really should stuff money aside and just wait for a deep sale and jump on them all then and be done with it...

So in the mean time, I am on the prowl for how to tweak the automations and routines to do cool stuff...

[csteele]

I don't know if the story I heard years ago is apocryphal or not, but I suspect it is...

A home had a Mirror.. like this:

They had problems with a ZWave switch in the bedroom.. quite often it wouldn't work, then suddenly it would. The story says that it turned out to be the angle of the mirror... depending on who used it last. Short person, the switch was dead, tall person, the switch worked.

The point is, we all have unique homes with unique placement of devices. There are so many variables that it's simply shocking it works, ever. It was two years ago that I most recently did a migration.. from ST to Hubitat. I had done a couple before and so I had experience and had adjusted my expectations.

[djh_wolf]

@1449smarthomeautomat

I'm glad you got your smarthome moved. I know the migration can be daunting for a NUMBER of reasons, meanwhile you're still trying to keep the house functional in the process.

Ahah.... Reminds me of when I purchased my first hubitat (c7) during the summer of lockdown. The wife was constantly telling me just stop messing about with the smart tech (we were using smartthings, and she was tired of my near-constant maintenance.... "why is something always broken? Just put a normal switch back!" etc).

We have a joint account which we constantly move cash from in small chunks to a seperate billing account. I remember being so utterly sick/defeated by smartthings (I'd invested so much time, money and effort... Mostly time... I didnt want to admit defeat!), that I decided to sneakily move a few quid (in parts) to the billing account, stealthy, and then move that into a disused account from which I sneakily bought a c7.

Intention was to slowly migrate everything over, and mask it all by telling her I was setting up a new dash. Which was actually sharptools, but she'd never know it was hubitat until I'd managed to get everything up and running.

In the end, I sorted out the zoned CH system first which was always useless under ST. That's when the suprised positivity came from the wife, because it was very noticeably far superior. Ditto to the way lights/motion worked.

Once the wife was actually fairly impressed by it all, and had actually started to ask me to add a few toys every here and there, I broke the news that I'd blown more than a hundred quid on a new hub.

Thankfully because it was ace, totally accepted and loved by the wife after a good few years of hating my smartthings hobby, she was actually happy I'd done it.

With a new baby due within weeks (he's nearly one year old now!), blowing 140 quid or whatever it was probably wasn't the smartest move. But the benefits! Wow. Thoroughly amazed by it all.

Can't express just how much I love this product. Potentially that love may have been lessened had i not experienced the absolute clusterf**k over at the Samsung camp.

But hey ho.

Welcome!