I’m having a great time with HE

Why Hubitat Elevation
#21

I use event Engine, and actually a few other of his apps, and I have found @bptworld to be more than helpful and accommodating, and very responsive. When I started using EE, I flat out told him what I wanted to do. He wrote up a few examples for me and was there to help if I had questions. You have to work with him and give him details, information and sometimes logs so he knows what he is looking for or trying to do. Keep in mind he does it for fun. He doesn't work for hubitat, and he's not doing it to make money.

Near as I can tell, the app you were looking for, lighting effects, isn't a stand alone app, or even a stand out section of event Engine. It is embedded in the triggers, actions etc. I have not used it myself (I looked at it, but it didn't meet my needs) but it is there. I have found with both event Engine and rule machine you are best served to figure or write out what you want and how before working on your rules or cogs. I generally find Event Engine much easier for me to wrap my mind around. Not saying it's perfect, just easier for me.

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#22

While I’m sure there are some instances (as is true in ANY group…you have all heard the same truism that 5% of any group does 95% of all the work), as a relatively new user (I first got my HE 1 1/2 years ago during the Covid shutdown in my state) I must chime in to say that this community has been incredibly responsive and helpful from the start and continues to be in my experience. I am indebted to all those who have stepped up and have NEVER had any of my questions or requests for help go unheeded. This level of support and community was one of the reasons I chose to go with HE in the first place and I would encourage anyone that might be perusing this forum prior to considering getting HE (as I did) to not let the OP’s bad experience discourage you from thinking you will be left high and dry regarding help or assistance with HE.

I am not discounting the OP’s opinion but just wanted to chime in respectfully with my experience as a counterpoint as I have had nothing but great feedback from more experienced users whenever I have made a request for help. I have also NEVER experienced any “smugness” or condescension in response to any of my “asks” (and I am sure that even though I try to responsibly perform extensive searches prior to posting a question, that I am guilty of asking a question that had previously been answered).

I have no affiliation with either Hubitat nor this forum but am an enthusiastic user and supporter in large part due to the level and quality of support from those on this forum (unlike my past experiences with other home automation groups). Just my 2 cents (which is due less and less due to inflation, lol). Happy Holidays to all!

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#23

Hey, this is my thread and it’s about how cool HE is and how great the members are at helping others with problems. If you don’t want to stay on topic then please start your own thread.

I’m a programmer but my background is RPG, Fortran and Basic so none of the Groovy procedures are familiar to me. I’m learning just like all the other newbies in here and I’m here to tell you these guys are fabulous at helping us when we get stuck or just have no idea how to do something.

I’m having a great time with all this automation. So far along with HE I am using DSC for my alarm system with Envisalink installed so I can use HE rules. Blueiris on a windows server with 14 IP cameras and I have Blueiris communicating with HE. 4 echo speakers and 3 echo shows all working well with HE. When my driveway camera sees a car, Echospeaks announces it on my echo speaker. That is so cool. I’m also using the dreaded Cree Zigbee lights. They are unreliable with the echo show Zigbee radio but they have been flawless for months with the HE radio. Alexa rules my house for voice commands and HE integrates well with Alexa. HE also controls my Zigbee door locks. HE reboots my router and my server once a week.

Life is better with HE :slight_smile:

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#24

I was going to post a comment about the great COBOL community integration, fully compatible with the latest ZWave punch card readers, but in the interest of not seeming snarky I withheld my comments. I do, however, still IPL my HE rather than rebooting it.

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#25

My apologies. I mistakenly referenced the OP. I meant to reference the poster that said the HE forum was becoming like the HA forum. My bad. Please do not take offense.

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#26

I did a few years of cobol too but I left that out cause it sort of shows your age lol

IPL - that made me smile.

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#27

None taken, I knew exactly to whom you were referring.

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#28

This is the "steep" portion of the learning curve that some have mentioned. You don't really need to know any programming languages, but it is immensely helpful to understand conditions, loop structures, logical operators, and other "programming" methods.

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#29

BTW, I also have HE integrated with my DSC panel via Envisalink. In addition, I have my security cameras linked via Camect which gives me very good object recognition which allows HE rules to control Lutron an other automations based on not only motion detection but also on object recognition. This in addition to having fabricated some custom PC relay boards that interact with DSC as well to control other security functions (such as not allowing the internal garage door button to operate when the system is armed in away mode). I am also having fun with HE.

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#30

You don't need any of that. I am a total dummy when it comes to both of these. I have never felt the need to use a variable in any of my rules. I did try one to say that I did (and as part of Beta testing) but didn't continue using it after trying one.

I wish I knew how to use programming languages, there are some apps, integrations, and drivers I would love to write or even just edit to work differently. But for 99% of the stuff I do, I have never needed any programming skills with Hubitat. It simply isn't needed.

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#31

Object recognition is one of the areas I’m still working with. Too many of my cameras Alert when it’s snowing or raining. I’ll take a look at what you’re talking about and see if I can use that method.
Blueiris does have an add-on that will do car recognition but I haven’t messed with it yet.

#32

At the risk of being off topic (and I, too, immensely enjoy my HE, and functionality has greatly improved in the year and a half since I migrated from Wink and SmartThings), I believe that one of the steepest hurdles causing confusion to those of us who are septuagenarians is method overloading in Groovy.

#33

I started with MATLAB in college (20-ish years ago) and learned about WHILE/FOR loops and IF/ELSE-IF/ELSE conditions using that. I've never really programmed anything, but understanding those concepts has been a life-saver when using RM.

Once I got comfy in RM, I've been able to automate things that I honestly never would've considered as "Home Automation" before I got my HE... also just over a year ago. It's the first hub I've ever used and could likely be my main platform for the foreseeable future.

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#34

No kidding, me too. They tell me just copy this groovy source and paste it here then you have a program, then paste the driver part here. I don’t really need to understand groovy I just need to understand the directions and follow them. Often I don’t exactly follow them and that gets me in trouble. Sometimes people in here help me by saying follow these directions exactly. Finding the exact directions for doing something or loading a program is where I suffer. Sometimes you can search a long time through the various posts trying to find out how to load something. Several times I found some instructions that seem to be old. But eventually people have pointed me in the right direction and it’s all worked out well.

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#35

Hi Dalecway,

Object recognition in Camect can discriminate between person, type of vehicle (even recognizes UPS vs Amazon vs USPS vs FedEx car vs truck etc) and type of animals detected (if you need to discriminate between dog, cat, bear, deer, squirrel, raccoon etc). I also have my Echo devices announce whether the mail has been delivered or if an Amazon package has arrived (it recognizes and discriminated between different company logos if visible) and which entrance it was left at. Recognition is quite good on my system but it takes a while for the Camect to “learn” your system (you can tweak this by sending a clip to Camect so they can refine the machine AI whenever an object is incorrectly identified). I never have any problems with rain being detected as motion (in Socal, so snow is not an issue at any rate). Like the HE forum, Camect team has been extremely responsive to inquiries on their forum and firmware updates to the system are regularly made to improve performance

Only problem is the 24MB limit on each Camect hub due to hardware limitations. Another plus is that like HE, Camect is totally local in operation. You can get multiple hubs but allocation of bandwidth is critical to efficiently use the hub with only one hub as in my case. I only use 4K (8MB) on some of my more critical cameras and 2K (4MB) or even 1080p on less critical areas. I only run 7 cameras of varying bandwidth due to this limitation. At one point, Camect allowed you to download their software onto your own hardware to overcome this limitation (was a custom request) but i believe they no longer allow this. They do have a commercial license for those needing greater capacity at this time (apartment owners etc). Hope this helps.

#36

Oh, and one other thing if you are considering Camect for better object AI. Unfortunately, Camect does not do individual facial recognition at this time. You cannot have it discriminate between your face and another person such as a family member. To help get over the Camect hardware limitation (it is physically the same size as the He hub and was supposedly designed for the “average” user that did not want cloud reliance, but wanted simple set up and good object recognition) I limit the stream to the Camect hub to 1080p but stream to my other NVR at full resolution simultaneously. So you can continue to use BI in conjunction with Camect for most object recognitions but use Camect for more mission critical object recognition tasks (in my case, my outdoor security cameras). Again, hope this info is useful.

#37

I'm drinking Victory Hopdevil at the moment because I don't program in cobol anymore... So there's that....I'll get a bit more tipsy and try to write rules.

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#38

Very helpful. Thanks so much for the information. I’m looking into it today.

#39

I strongly recommend looking into Innr Zigbee bulbs. They have been flawless, very reliable, and dim all the way down to 1%. I use them with the Advanced Zigbee bulb driver.
I started with the Cree, then went Sylvania/Osram, then Sengled. Skip the Sylvania and Sengled, just go with Innr. You will be very happy. As an added bonus, they are compatible with hue if that's a consideration for you.

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#41

The reply wasn't " find it your self that's the fun in it" you left out important context. He asked you what you were trying to do, to which you never actually gave an answer (I have seen you do this in other threads recently as well). It reads to me like he figured you either lost interest or figured it out on your own.
Had you continued to constructively engage, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have helped you achieve what you are trying to do.

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