Partly out of curiosity, and party out of HA Redditors telling me I cannot judge HA without trying it first, I spun up HA on a PI 4 and used the Hubitat app to get devices from HA, and the HA Hubitat HAC to pull my Hubitat devices into HA.
I won't be using the automations in HA, as I write all my automations into my own Groovy apps and I have been very happy with that (though I used to use Webcore, which still seems far superior to HA automations). YAML can be written and modified on HA for more control, but it is still nothing like writing an app in Groovy for me,
I won't be using their dashboards, as I am pretty set with my current ones on Hubitat. I learned so many CSS tricks I have managed to make some good looking and very functional dashboards that I would not want to try and recreate in HA.
So I am at a bit at a loss. What is something people have done with HA attached to Hubitat that I may be missing out on? Did I just waste money on a PI 4? I got a deal on the PI 4 at $35 on Ebay, so no big loss.
The HA fanbois on Reddit apparently have no idea what Hubitat can do, and they make a lot of assumptions about its limitations. They said I needed to try HA to judge it, and I'm really not impressed. The UI is a mess to navigate, and now I don't know what to even do with it. I will dig deeper to FIND a use, I guess. If not, I guess I will just find a better use for the PI 4.
TBH not sure why (other than curiosity) you would set up HA with no problem to solve and then look for uses for it .
Plenty of ppl here use HA to do things that are not supported on HE (robot vacuum integrations for example). Also I can't program in groovy but I'm pretty comfortable with node-red and use that extensively for complex automations.
And (perhaps less relevant in the world of home automation ) the cost of entry is far lower. A pi plus a zigbee or zwave stick costs significantly less than a HE unit.
I run HAOS on a Home Assistant Yellow (with a 8GB CM4 and 1TB NVME SSD). I use this platform to run Node-RED, InfluxDB, Grafana, and NUT add-ons. It is great having the ability to store and display historical data, from my Hubitat system as well as my IoTaWatt home energy monitoring systems.
I also am able to locally integrate in my two Ecobee thermostats and two Aqara FP2 sensors via the HA HomeKit Device integration.
There are many things that a RPi running HAOS can be used for in conjunction with Hubitat Elevation. It is always nice to have options!
For what it's worth I use Home Assistant to bring in some contact sensors that didn't work well on Hubitat when I first added them to my home. So another of those using HA to support hardware that either wasn't supported, or didn't play well on Hubitat.
I use HA to integrate my Apple TVs and HPMs, Litter Robot, HP printer, Roomba, minisplit HVAC unit, and TP-Link devices. I know the TP-Link are supported on HE, but HA seems to poll them much faster and It takes that load off of HE.
My current HA setup runs on a mini PC running a Ryzen 5600g inside of unraid. Also my Plex and other home server stuff. Anyways my HA server this time has nothing connected and I have it doing nothing but.... It's been up and stable and not been updated for over 300 days now, lol.
So I guess I can say I'm burnt out with home automation. My Hubitat just works and it's just easier to replace some of those simple devices with Habitat friendly ones.
I have 60 integrations setup in HA along with 26 add-ons and the majority of them are doing stuff Hubitat can’t do. I’m also running 310 apps on two C5’s with over 350 devices.
My HA system is running the latest version of HAOS on a BMAX mini PC with a 12th gen intel processor, a 512GB SSD and 16GB of DDR4 memory.
push notifications to all users and to HA dashboard
After many years of experience with st, hubitat and ha it's just not that easy to build everything on one hub. Best combo so far for me is definitely hubitat and ha. Possibilities are enormous. That been said..I'm pretty sure that if I would add all z-wave devices to HA I would get exactly the same or probably even better outcome. That day might come but it's not yet.
One of the things I relied on HA for was the Alexa Media Player from HACS to bring in Alexa Air Quality Sensor into HE. Unfortunately, the combination of the latest version of HA and AMP caused a huge memory loss and forced HA into a boot loop to point that HA people in charge blocked it. i don't know how they did it but integration disappeared from my HA before I had the boot loop issue.
I set up HA specifically because that was the only way I could get access to the My Subaru app outside of the official app and use home automation with it. Since then, I found out that I can make Ecobee local. It also has native integration with my Android/Google TV's and a few other things. I do use automations on the HA side using helpers to have HE communicate with HA.
I have used the HA locations to add extra automations for things like: When my wife or I leave our work zone, it automatically resumes my ecobee schedule. With the My Subaru app, I now have repurposed two of my Ikea button controllers that now work with HE to start/stop the engine on my cars, lock the doors, unlock the doors wihtout having to open the app and put in a pin every time.
Totally not using the full capabilities of HA. But definitely enjoying the flexibility that two platforms has opened up.
I use the dashboards in HA just because I think they look better without the need to learn and experiment with CSS. I'm sure I could get HE to look much better, but HA looks good with very little effort on my part. I also have my ecobee directly connected to HA via the HomeKit emulation. Other than that, most of my stuff is in HE, including all Z* devices and 99% of the automations and such. HE is a very important part of my home setup, actually the most important when considering all it does, but HA gives me some options. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a hybrid approach if it works for you. Use what you want to do what you want with the amount of effort you want to put into it.
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) the cost of entry is far lower. A pi plus a zigbee or zwave stick costs significantly less than a HE unit.
