World news is pretty $#!t at the moment, let's try and bring some positivity where we can. Call out anything that brought a spark into your day, ideally home automation related, but I suspect many would take anything at the moment...
For me I still come back to the continued help from this Community, people willing to offer their own time and experience to help me with my own projects, testing or helping with the development of my drivers.
For those who made the transition to HE over the last 18 months from various platforms, what has HE offered that you did not have previously....?
Obviously there are plenty of more weighty topics in the world today, but I suspect we are meant to keep things "light", so let's not get too political or controversial...
The biggest thing that pulled me from ST to HE.....Webcore. As you have noted, community support here is phenomenal, and that includes help with Webcore. I am super happy with the switch and will never look back to ST.
I don't have a previous "smart" platform to compare to, so can only comment on my transition from a Hue-centric setup to one that opened up my options to settings like modes and the use of contact sensors, etc,.....
HE provided consistent way to configure modes that meant more than just changes in lighting.... Plenty more benefits you all are hopefully aware of....
Good idea for a topic. I consider myself still fairly new to home automation. I started with an Echo 4. My thought was something simple and minimal for my simple mind. Again it was all so new to me. That quickly became insufficient and realizing I needed a dedicated hub after all. One inexpensive option, and what read to be the most user friendly, was SmartThings. That really began opening this world. However, although my WiFi in my home is solid, the signal TO the house is unreliable and I've learned slow. Those two factors and security started me looking for something local. Hubitat stood out as THE hub to fit the bill. There was a learning curve but by then I was determined and moreover, hooked. I also found a great community here with so many knowledgable people willing to help, teaching me so much. This was long but I wanted to point out how much I appreciate all of you and this product.
In short, three things Local control, powerful customizations and this community.
Thank you.
Joined 4 years ago.. disheartened by the seemingly inevitable decline of Smart Things. Amazed by the energy of the community and the staff at Hubitat, Inc. Have not looked back.
While the hub is great, the people of this worldwide community really make it work. It has become a big part of my online experience ("Meta" who? ).
Truly special and thanks to everyone!! You are the one of the best things this crazy internet has to offer.
It is about COMMUNITY. For home automation, that community is based on the personal platform (Hubitat, HE, some others). The people in this community are absolutely the GREATEST and the Hubitat model of a user-centric system is the model I really appreciate. Finally, the Hubitat staff are integrated in the community and NOT part of a borg.
I left SmartThings due to the massive changes they were slow rolling as well as the mandated development environment shift. This made ST not user-based but instead based on meeting the desires of the Samsung Borg. I use Amazon for voice control (sigh); however, until there is a workable, personal and private voice assistant I will keep it for convenience. (I already sold my soul to Amazon on Fire TV and Prime in the name of convenient technology. But I can stop any time (not really).
I'm with you on that. I'd like to add that @Hubitat_Staff are active members of that community, and are typically very responsive to community needs.
One instance that stands out in my mind is when they very rapidly made the hub's UI JAWS compatible after receiving this request from a single visually-impaired user.
But this experience is better told from the perspective of that user themselves:
I am staining a concrete floor, and needed some good lighting, but once I stained an area there was no way to turn off the work lights. Zigbee plug to the rescue! Wife loves it, as we can stand in the doorway and remotely turn on the lights to inspect (admire?) the work. Silly, I know, but it made me happy.
I would like to add another factor to @robertsonslodge list- reliability of notifications. I am new to Hubitat from ST in the last 4 months. Notifications on ST was a crapshoot…sometimes 1 hour or more late, many times never received. Hubitat has worked consistently and reliably every time.
Good times for us, especially in the Home Automation / Hubitat arena.
We had some electrical contractors out a day or two ago who did a ton of work. Firstly, although it's completely orthogonal to HE, they replaced the simple extractor fans in both bathrooms with combination fan / heat lamp fixtures. WAF of this is over 9000, she'd (justifiably) been complaining that it was really cold getting out of the shower.
Then we get to all the home automation shenanigans. I finally got a couple of Sonoff ZBMini switches for the two recessed can lights over the showers. They were duly installed, along with a pair of Zooz ZEN 71s, and the nightlights in both bathrooms are working like a charm. Switch the lights on, everything comes on. Switch off during the day, everything goes off. Switch off at night, everything goes off, except one bulb stays on at a low level to be a nightlight.
BTW, I had to chose the device type myself for the Sonoffs, since it wasn't filled in after doing a Zigbee pairing to find them. I set them to "Generic Zigbee Outlet", since I figured that's the closest approximation to what they do. Seems to work fine, the only thing I ever do to them is call their respective on() and off() routines.
We also had them do a bit of other wiring, involving the exterior lighting at the front of the house. End result is we can now control the two "carriage lights" mounted on either side of the garage door independently of the porch light outside the front door.
Which in turn means the carriage lights can now stay on all night without getting a huge wash of light in the front hallway. And of course, that allows me to control the carriage lights with a smart switch and the HE, turning them off at sunrise, on again at sunset. Very traditional! WAF is nowhere near as high as the heat lamps, but still definitely in positive territory.
For me the home automation industry has provided a solution to a problem I had been procrastinating over for some time now, like any good problem, how to include a small night stand next to a rarely used spare bed in my study. The Swedes came to the rescue providing the wall-mounted Symfonisk speaker, with a little help from the U.S.. If only they could provide the ongoing encouragement to actually mount the speaker on the wall, rather than sitting on the unused dining chair close-by to where the speaker should be mounted.... Or even the labour for the larger job that should be done to patch and paint the wall before mounting....
Hurray for Hubitat making the DST change automatically! I was so frustrated with the ST hub twice a year because it never did the DST change without manual intervention.
).
Or even the labour for the larger job that should be done to patch and paint the wall before mounting....
