I’m having a great time with HE

Instead of using Rule Machine right off, use things like Simple motion and simple automation and basic rules. These will do 98% of what you want.

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Read, ask questions, try small things first, and then branch out as the interface becomes more familiar. This forum is a great resource, and everyone (well most everyone :sunglasses:) is willing to give helpful advice and insight.

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Don't forget bribery..maybe a little extortion... I mean hey, it can't hurt....

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Yeah, as I said in a different thread, I would gladly pay for a Zigbee Glass Break Sensor driver!
Larry

If you send one to mike maxwell, and ask nice, he could probably write a native driver for it.

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OK, I'll have one next week and I will contact him then. Thanks

HE has won me over from a ISY-994ZW Pro. I'm hoping the Dashboards will improve in appearance over time, but I have zero regrets. It's a lot of fun!

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It is fun, but sometimes I wonder about the definition of fun. I am now in the process of converting my Hue bulbs from Abode as my hub to HE, It seems that sometimes Hue makes it painless and other times...not so much.

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At various times, staff have commented that they have long-term plans to improve the UI/UX. In the meantime, there are several third-party solutions to creating Dashboards.

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Just make sure you don't have other zigbee devices on the same mesh as the hue bulbs if you're attaching the hue bulbs directly to HE

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I read a bunch of posts about that, but I could not see the failure point if my mesh was well established with lines repeaters. I have good repeaters in every room at this point and just 5 hue bulbs. Seems to be working fine right now, including an Aurora controller for 3 of the bulbs.

So hue bulbs and their ilk (cree etc) are ZLL. Everything else is going to be ZHA. ZLL make bad repeaters and messengers. You've read about that. That said, just because you have a repeater in a room, does not mean that your ZHA based zigbee device is going to route through that instead of routing through the currently on ZLL based bulb. Now when this bulb turns off (or rather to low power mode) it will stop routing. Your ZHA zigbee device isn't going to be graceful enough to just start going through the repeater. Or it may take a long time for it to do so. This makes for an unstable mesh. Even the developers of HE recommend that ZLL based bulbs be on their own mesh. Either using another HE or a hue bridge. We've seen people be perfectly fine for lets say a year, then wonder why all of a sudden that things are dropping off their mesh when they haven't changed anything. They eliminate the bulbs and whoosh! Everything stabilizes. It's a story as old as time (or at least this forum lol)

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Thanks, a Hue bridge may be in my future. But not today as the agony of resetting and pairing Hue bulbs and the Aurora controller will stick with me for a while. The E26 bulbs were easy, as was another Hue motion detector. The E12 bulbs were a completely different story, but I have them set up on an Aurora controller also because my wife refuses to talk to Alexa.

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I'm like that too. Why i prefer automation over remote control. Hell I have a minimal dash on my phone and that's mainly to check temps

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Just ordered a new C-7 unit to replace my older C-4. Haven't got it yet, should be here next Monday. Looking forward to having a great time with it as well. I currently run all my automation from an Indigo Domotics app running from my Mac. It has been running flawlessly for many years, but I feel there is been little advance in the last couple of years, specially regarding the way things are shown in a dashboard. It has a capable but limited set of facilities and looks dated because the pair of developers apparently either lack necessary UX design habilities or have no interest in providing a modern interface to their users.

I will probably integrate HE with Indigo in the first place, to see if I can use the dashboard app in designing my control panels. Once I'm up to speed, I may start moving my zigbee and zwave devices into the HE hub, but I'm retired now and in no hurry to do so.

UPDATE Jan 18, 2022: Got my C-7 today. Added Hue integration and was able to very easily add all my Hue lights into a Dashboard. Next thing I did was add a spare Zigbee three way switch I had in my. gadget drawer. HE added a parent device and three child devices, which I subsequently added to the Dashboard. Easy Peasy! Congrats to the Hubitat Team. Next thing I will do is try to integrate it with my Indigo system to find a way to integrate my 60+ z-wave devices, which I have NO intention of reseting and moving into HE any time soon.

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Interested in a 3rd-party alternative to HE Dashboards - can you give some references or links? There appears to be a lot of capability to the HE Dashboard system but I cannot seem to get the layout tools to perform as I think they're supposed to and I've been stymied by the relative lack of documentation.

I use Smartly. Basically just makes your existing dashboards look better, although I did read something about possibly adding drag-n-drop functionality. Author used to be a member of this community but now is part of (cofounded?) a company planning to develop a competing platform. Search Google for "smartly inject" for more info.

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In addition to the Smartly add-on that @dylan.c mentioned there are at least four other choices that are linked to below:

All four of those developers: @bill.venhaus , @jpage4500, @good.looking.blues, and @kewashi are super responsive to questions

Hope this helps!

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Thanks @aaiyar for the links, looks like some good quality stuff to check out!

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My HousePanel dashboard has gone dormant these days but I still personally use it in my home. The version posted here still works great. If you try it out, let me know. With all that said, the built-in HE dashboards have gotten good enough these days that you probably don't need it unless you just gotta have the sophisticated customizations that are built into HousePanel. I use it because I'm all set up and am used to it. It does require a rPI to install and configure.

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