On a more lighthearted note. Everyday while I get to have my one cup of coffee, like a child at Christmas (or their equivalent religious holiday) hoping to get their favorite toy, I open Hubitat and excitedly look in the upper right-hand corner and look for that little red bubble hoping for new updates bringing new feature changes. Also, like a child who receives socks instead of their favorite toy, I am disappointed when there is no little read bubble. So, I go about my crazy day just hoping for Christmas tomorrow.
It seems that lately is has been really quiet. I fake myself out saying that this next "Christmas" is taking longer because maybe; just maybe, all this quietness is because the owners are in the background getting ready to announce something big, really big.
Not only yet another new and improved UI or feature rich update...but could it be? On no, new hardware too? Maybe two models at the same time? Not only the entry level model C9 but also the C9 Pro for those who want the option of a octal CPU multi-threaded or multi -tasking processor and OS capable OS, POE power built in with no external power supply, built-in UPS aware OS with automatic graceful shutdown capabilities, optional UPS Solar port backup with cabling option long enough to connect to a solar panel up to 50' away, 18-64 TB memory. Well it is a Holiday dream. Why not LOL. Wait. I just woke up from my dream. Off to a cazy day.
I do have to say for me, the developers should know of an unintended consequence of Hubitat. ADDICTION. Every time I have convinced myself there is nothing else I can do with Hubitat I feverishly start over and scour this wonderful community looking for more and more and more to do. Maybe Hubitat should; with their future hubs, provide an addiction warning and capsule. Even if it is just a cardboard one
Well I guess you can tell I have not serious commitments this morning YEAH!!
Joining the beta I can see doing. I have a brand new hub in the closet. Is there a way to bring that hub up and isolate it from production? I am all in. But to go live in the production environment. Won't do that.
Yeah, you would likely want to have a spare HE hub to play with the beta platform version. If you set it up and don't mesh any devices or other settings like modes, then you should be good in terms of in not affecting your Production setup...
My 'production hub' (my only hub!) is enrolled in beta. I'll usually just keep an eye on the beta forum for 24 hours after a release. Clearly there are going to be bugs found as that's the point of beta but if I don't see any big issues reported I'll update. That methodology hasn't bitten me yet.
All good points / approaches. I am not looking for that kind of excitement though. I have too many other IT issues I work on that I get paid for LOL.
Not to be misinterpreted as I don't read the forum and try to help answer questions. I do. Again, love helping out where I can.
In my home however, I want reliability. That said I would love to help contribute and do get that "excitement" of new stuff but in an isolated environment that does not "FORCE" me to fix yet another "problem" My schedule does not easily allow for that.
Joining beta, you go from one of the waiting kids to one of the elf’s helping with the building. It can be quite fun! And you can go back to the production version quickly and easily.
If you are interested, please request to join the Beta Testers group .
The only issue is unless that hub has devices and automations running on it, your participation in the beta won't be very interesting for you, and won't provide much information to HE team. Installing the new platform version on an empty hub will mostly be crickets... You'll need some skin in the game to play.
So unless you have some spare or "non-critical" devices you can install in your "beta" hub (and then create some automations w/them), joining the beta won't be very exciting for you or HE.
But I totally get the "waiting for Christmas" feeling.
FWIW. I have been a Beta user for 9+ months. Oddly I haven't found it a dangerous frontier with endless bugs. For the most part it involves getting older issues fixed sooner and being exposed to new features faster. Everyone's risk tolerance is different but I haven't ever felt like I should drop out of the Beta program.
Actually, I have my main hub as well as my dev hub in the Beta program, when I'm confident enough I update the main hub when testing I will use the dev hub for testing and will add spare devices but also mesh devices to test out different aspects of what has changed. Of course mesh devices will not work for device driver updates but for app updates, this works perfectly.
Agreed! And the great thing with Hubitat is that Beta users (really all users) can revert back to and earlier platform version (and possibly retore a matching earlier database backup) if something really bad happens in the Beta... Just don't be too eager to update the Zigbee or Z-Wave radio firmware, as I do not believe those can easily be reverted! For those, I am happy to be patient - unless I have an issue that the radio firmware update to known to resolve!
Unless I haven't read your post closely enough...
My schedule does not easily allow for that.
