Over the past couple years, I seem to have fallen into a two-legged architecture: (1) we use HE largely for automations; and (2) we use Home Assistant largely for dashboards. I usually try to integrate each device directly to both platforms (HE and HA) in parallel, which works 80-90% of the time. And from there, we automate and dashboard til the cows come home.
Except sometimes, a device stops working when we integrate dually. In such situations, we integrate just once and then rely on HADB and/or the Hubitat integration to send devices back and forth betwixt and between. I find this part to be the least elegant; it's the birthplace of one-off problems. That's not a slight at the devs who continue to do amazing volunteer work on these integrations. It's just a tough nut to crack, especially with the proliferation of non-standard devices like water heaters or dehumidifiers, for example.
So, getting to my point, there are some products (e.g., Konnected, Flume, Monoprice Amp) that don't seem to allow concurrent/dual integrations. Which presents a real obstacle to our 2-legged architecture. This has me wondering WHY. For those who know way more about the technical underpinnings than I do, is it obvious to you a priori why some products can't or don't support dual integrations?
My working hypotheses:
- in some cases (like Flume), I could integrate in parallel, but they have API call limits and double-polling tests those limits
- in other cases, the device uses Telnet which doesn't seem to play well on a party line.
But I don't really understand this. So I'd love to hear from others:
- is this dual architecture sensible? Are there others out there who do this too? What are alternative views?
- why do some devices not like dual integration -- and is there any workaround/hack I can try?
Discuss.
The best I can offer would be the example of my EcoWitt Gateway Driver where you can send on the data feed from the HE hub to an alternate destination.
