I've just had an epiphany, one year after becoming a Hubitat owner

LOL. I'm raising a generation of children that are slowly losing the ability to even understand what a "switch" is....

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You can actually have most of the data go to node red via UDP then into Hubitat so that your weather station is completely local not relying on their servers or your internet to be up if you have automations relying on real time info coming in. There are a few of the stations attributes I still use his integration for that aren't needed for up to the minute necessary of being local.

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Do any of you ever feel so overwhelmed by all the cool ideas out there that you just don't know where to begin with implementing theM? :slight_smile:

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I would completely agree with you maybe 2 years ago. Now, I hardly have any issue other than battery change or when I screw around with my network. Which I tend to do it too often for no apparent reason.
With ST and Wink... The pain was endless but sometime I like suffering for a second of joy.

Had a weather station & website for 20+ years. It went belly up 4 years ago so I "retired" from forecasting. 3 days ago, I purchased a Ambient WS-2902C. Love it and so much easier to set up than my old system. Ain't technology great?

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My bath rooms are also doing that. But In my case , my parents are really happy about the fact they do not have to switch on or off the light or exhaust fan. Me meanwhile saving some money on the power consumption.

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One of my indicators that a new automation is successful, or at least acceptable, is if I never hear about it.
When I first started I was always wanting to show off the cool things I was doing to my family. Turns out they didn't care a bit. They just wanted things to work. If I can make them work better that's good enough for me.
Some of my automations are, in fact, completely invisible. For example, by the time anyone gets to the basement stairwell at night it is dimly lit. There is no way to even see that light turn on or off at night. I know it does because I programmed it to (and I checked the logs to be sure). But anybody else in the house (if they thought about it at all) would assume the light is just being left on all night.

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Lol same. Anymore I don't hardly tell them about new stuff. For example I finally got my bedroom tv setup to turn on with my alarm clock lights and tune itself to the local news. I havnt even told my wife about it, but she'll find out next week when we wake up for work.

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My wife sees all my playing with Hubitat as nothing but an avoidance of having local caretakers, who live in our residences when we are gone.

Despite this, we walked from the back door down the walk to the front of the house (motion detectors with blinders on worked out our direction of travel), I opened the gate (which reported the open and relock of the gate behind me), so given that the house doors were each closed and locked, the system worked out that the garage door should also be closed, as the car was already out in the drive (a second "safety beam") notices which direction the travel into the garage is, and a 3rd aimed just aft of the front bumper notices the presence of a car (beam broken) or not (beam unbroken).

So, the garage door closed by itself. "Pretty sexy", sez my love and obsession, "but there's a perfectly good button in the Volvo to close the garage door, and I have another tiny garage keyfob in my purse - how much time did all that take?

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I hate it when wives say stuff like that that makes so much sense....

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It's a hobby all in it's own self!

Maybe change the name to Hobbytat?

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That's exactly right. It's a hobby now. And I wasn't even looking for a new hobby. But now I've got one...

I'll say I don't need this *%^@$! anymore, and then I'll read some cool idea that someone else executed with their Hubitat, and then the bug bites me, and suddenly I want it, too.

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A weather station is cool, but not $320+ cool. I'll take my free Accuweather app, look at the temperature for the day, and increase my AC temp for the day. Takes about 30 seconds.

I have some transparent panels in the wall of my house. I can look through them and see how bright it is. Check the color and shape of the clouds and any motion of tree leaves and branches, I can see if water is falling from the sky or if the ground is wet. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I used to think the same thing.... Until I got a weather station.

I look at it a LOT. What's the UV (do I need sunscreen?), How much rain did I really get at MY house (should I water the lawn and landscaping?)? Etc.

Necessary? No, not at all. But very handy.

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But you can't look through those when you are not there... Perhaps you need a camera positioned to look out of them and beam that image to you wherever you are... :grin:

I find those panels don’t operate too well in the dark either, whereas my WX continues just fine...

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At the end of this soliloquy, I pose a question with which I would love feedback. So in case you find it difficult to read long and drawn out messages perhaps you could skip to the question and provide any useful advice you might have.

I wouldn't consider my experience with Hubitat to be a love/hate relationship. I find myself either content or frustrated and currently I'm in a state of frustration.

I got my first HE as soon as I learned of its existence. The annoyances of SmartThings had worn on me and Hubitat completely eliminated those by running locally. When my C-5 arrived, I was living in an apartment and because it was my first foray into Hubitat I was initially lost. I quickly discovered that I would need to leverage the Community but I'd say I was initially intimidated by boards. I had never really spent much time on community discussion boards of the Hubitat variety. So, I tried to find alternate avenues of enlightenment after reading some of the threads and noticing that everybody knew more about home automation and the underlying technologies than I ever would, and they threw out abbreviations and/or acronyms so casually as to leave me wondering what they were even talking about by the 50th reply. But I worked my way through what for me was a steep learning curve and had my pad as automated and customized as I needed and wanted. So being finally content I just sat back and basked in the awesomeness that is Hubitat.

Fast forward almost a year (and the beginning of a pandemic) and I moved out of that decked out apartment and into my new house. I figured I'd just recreate in my house much of the automation I had already built in my apartment but that just wasn't in the cards. In my attempts to recreate the automations I encountered issues with which I hadn't previously dealt. Most of the issues seemed relatively minor so I figured I'd just pop back on the Community boards and quickly have things working again. But by the time I remembered how to get to the community site and logged on I was like Holy Snikes!!! It felt like all the effort I had put into learning everything I needed to know to setup my apartment was practically pointless. I mean I didn't know what was up and what was down as I started reading the threads I had once found so helpful. Some of the threads had seemingly grown exponentially to discuss all the iterations of apps and everything else that had developed since last I was thoroughly engrossed in the issues. I attempted to find answers to my new questions by heading to the most recent replies of relevant threads where I assumed I would find solutions with relative ease. That was a rude awakening - I didn't have enough current knowledge to fully understand what people were talking about. I figured I could read through the threads to follow their evolution but after an hour of reading the first one I was barely a quarter of the way through the thread so I knew it would take several hours to read through each juggernaut.

aint nobody got time for that GIF

I'm so frustrated now I'm almost content with my frustration. I don't have the time or energy to read all the discussions to catch up on everything that has changed. But I can't think of an efficient way to parse the back and forth to find the answers I need. So, I have to use buttons or my phone to turn everything on and off and living like a caveman is killing me. But I am attempting to find some Zen in my current state of disarray. Zen and I haven't been friendly since it stole my lunch money back in the third grade though.

So.... There has got to be a better way, right?!?

Could someone please enlighten me? How does one find answers that are timely and relevant these days and how does one find them in the future when they inevitably have a life event that discombobulates their smart home? I read daily summaries of current events relevant to my job, but I sure don't want to do that for my hobby.

Surely, there is a way to stay current on items of particular interest or at least keep a finger on the pulse of Hubitat happenings that doesn't involve dedicating time to read all the notifications on saved threads or otherwise scouring the boards week in and week out.

Does anyone have thoughts or best practices to share regarding how one can either maintain current awareness of the dynamic state of Hubitat or how to just swoop in and quickly find timely and relevant answers to life's most pressing smart home questions?

Maybe if I could get a solid solution I could move beyond contentment and find true love for my HE.

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This isn't so much an answer to your question, but I am keen, one day, to write a driver / app to pull details from the Community. I was mostly wanting to provide similar indicators of notifications or perhaps even use them as some kind of trigger, not sure yet. Potentially we could introduce some kind of rules or common filters you would like to use for providing topics of interest in some kind of dashboard tile or just a notification that there are some topics you may be interested in... like I said, really just a thought bubble at the moment...

Back to your actual post.... For general information about what's happening, my opinion would be that there are benefits to actively coming on to the forum and seeing what people are discussing, sometimes it is not always the same topics you may think you will be interested in that catch your eye. That's at least my experience... I would also understand if Hubitat themselves would prefer to encourage active participation rather than high level summaries as it encourages interaction and engagement with their customer-base. That said, I do get an email from the Grafana forum (which uses the same platform) showing me "topics I may be interested in". Not sure if that option could be turned on here....

EDIT - I would say that I think there could be more done to make finding out about new / upcoming releases easier. The information on the forum is great, don't get me wrong, what I would like is some kind of notification via email, etc, without having to go into the HE hub UI or keep tabs on the Community forum. Even just a single topic that you could bookmark and setup for notifications that was updated when a new release was made, linking off to the more detailed posts for each one.

In terms of solving problems, if you are in a hurry or don't fancy trawling through countless posts on a subject (and I can put myself firmly in that camp at times), a simple post asking for someone to point you in the right direction could be all you need. Often times at least one of the more seasoned members of the Community have experienced or been involved in discussions on most topics, not to mention the HE staff also being involved here. They can often refer people to previous threads of interest and sometimes even directly to the post that may help the most.

Hope this helps....

Simon

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Data Mining is definitely a skill that needs to be honed these days.. Sometimes it's hard to even know what to ask for in order to get help. Also not all responses are accurate or some are more accurate than others and it's hard to weed through it all..

I agree with @sburke781 - asking in a new post for help on where to look seems like a good starting point. This community is active enough that you should get some decent replies.

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