I see now.. battery device and the driver also polls. A battery device does not 'wake' often, maybe once an hour. It's how it conserves battery.
Ok, here's a review of Hubitat and Events.
Hubitat reacts to Events.. nothing else. Sunrise is an Event. 6:15 (for your thermostat) is an event. 6:16 is not.
IHubitat doesn't react to state. A door sensor detects a change. The CHANGE is an event, the fact the door is left open or closed is nothing. You can deduce that the door is still open because you didn't get the Closed Event. But Rules get evaluated when one of the elements changes.
You can click Done on a Rule and it gets evaluated (because Done acts like an event.)
AhHa! OK. Not sure what the implications of the polling are for me, but I'll ask that tomorrow! Til then, i can't thank you enough for all this advice. I'm getting warmer already ;). Cheers!
scroll to the bottom of the Device info page.. you'll see an area called Scheduled Jobs. I believe there's an entry there for a specific time that Hubitat will poll your thermo. Probably a second one for disabling Debug (30 mins auto disable)
I don't use this driver and my thermo isn't zwave so I can only guess what the poll is doing. Maybe someone that knows will chime in, tomorrow.
One suggestion, which you probably already considered... If you can get a C-wire to the thermostat it will not need to sleep (to conserve batteries) which will make it much more responsive. It'll also act as a Z-Wave repeater as well. Plus you won't need to keep feeding batteries to it.
Basic reason with the list is given Iris drops end of March, it's be easier to get the basics replaced and going. Then take it from there on the other goodies. Stuff like ceiling fan controls or driveway sensors. The "would like" after the "must have" kind of items.
I was an Iris user since the Gen 1 and went through the forced upgrade to Gen 2 which was rough and not well received by most. I have finished migrating all of my devices and once I got the hang of HE I was able to implement things much faster and with a level of customization that I could never have touched in Iris.
You and the team have done an excellent job with the videos on getting started, but I love having a document to look at. I also love the community concept, but for a new user it can be overwhelming at first especially when you see some really amazing ideas that the other community members have implemented.
Here are my thoughts on making a smoother transition for other Iris users, which could probably be thrown into a document labeled as such. I don't mind if you put it in the community, but a link to it on the tutorials page would be a huge help for new users.
Explain the 4 main applications needed.
With Iris essentially these four apps were already installed and there very few choices that could be made on them.
Hubitat Safety Monitor
The only thought is one you've already heard. That is Iris had different terminology which I was previously attached to like my Iris users, but after moving to HE and thinking bigger picture I have abandoned it and even relabeled my keypads with Home and Away.
Lock Code Manager
One of my biggest issues with Iris was their insistence that the alarm pin should be the pin for all locks; however, their setup was easy since I had no control. Setting up the lock was a bit different, but the functionality in HE is awesome.
Dashboard
Iris had a default layout in their app. They had sections for each item/device (e.g. alarm, switches, etc.) and if you didn't have a certain device then it was blank. If you did have the device then it was in the list. For the developers on your team, think a single column of tiles with a scrollable view that are grouped by device type and then ordered alpha numerically. This would also quickly port into a portable app in the future.
Rule Machine
I started using RM very heavily until I hit a wall and realized that all the basic functionality I was after was in the HSM. Now I just have some rules that turn on/off lights. There are a couple of virtual buttons I setup to control HSM so that my keypads would be linked with a digital keypad I developed in an android app that controls my HE Dashboard. I will release a screenshot soon to Show Off Your Dashboards!.
As I mentioned, you and the team have done an amazing job. Much of the explanations of the mentioned applications are in the community. I'm simply suggesting a single document specifically for an Iris user that points a page (preferably without comments) on each subject along with some supplemental info specifically for them. For instance, the getting started section has a lot of info, but the four apps mentioned above aren't at the top of that list, so you have to know what you are looking for to find it. This is just the kind of thing I prefer a cliff notes over a video. Once the other Iris users get through the initial setup and past the growing pains, I don't think they will look back.
Great perspective and helpful suggestions. This is appreciated. It also points out that a user's needs have a lot to do with where they are coming from. Having a fairly large number of Iris users migrating under some time pressure really brought out some of the areas where more work (instructions and documentation) is needed.
Very good ideas. But I don’t think that the time and resources should focus just on Iris users, because I think just updated docs and more new user transition docs will cover a large field, and be more relevant long term.
I think someone coming from Iris, Wink, ST, or no hub at all can still use general docs. The HE team only has so much time and resources.
After March ends you won’t see specific Iris user transition unless they are coming from another hub after that.
While I like videos, they can be only relevant to the release, it takes more resources and time to do videos. Prime example is the HE Alexa App vs HE Alexa Skill.
I think there needs to be more stickies or pinned threads.
If you have a soldering iron and rosin core solder you can carefully disassemble them and solder the contact back on. Then take some epoxy and epoxy the contact. I have successfully repaired the one I am currently using that way.
After spending the last month on this transition, I think the thing that's missing for Iris users are quick tutorials in words and screen shots, that show how to duplicate the Iris functionality we are used to. I doubt I'm unique in my basic needs: when you leave the house, you want most lights to go off, and the thermostats to save energy and an intrusion alert system to arm. When you return, you want that reversed. You want different climate at different times of the day. You want a button to shut off the stuff when you go to sleep. It would have saved me weeks if a power-user just chose a method (there are so many ways to do this in Hubitat!) and provided pictures of what to install, and how the rules (or modes or whatever you decide to use) end up looking. And did you use a trigger for that thing? An Action? Too many terms to pick from. Once people copy that recommended package and have it up and running, they have an idea how this works and they can start to deconstruct it for their more specific needs. But coming from the simplicity of Iris I just couldn't grasp the myriad possibilites or parse the huge forum. If I had a job right now, this would not have been possible. Summary: Simple step by step written tutorials are missing.
Right. But I found most of these tutorials simultaneously too simple and too complex to help me. First, they are too fragmented. They don't show how to join all this together into a system that does what I just described... the thing that Iris does out of the box. Then they assume you already understand that there are Modes and Rules and Triggers and Actions and Groups and Scenes etc. and that you can use these things or NOT use these things. That also is insanely confusing. The way Hubitat uses the word "Mode" was not understandable to me at all, and really still isn't because I'm not a programmer used to using Global Variables. Luckily someone finally explained that I don't need to use Modes. I can just use Rule Machine. (Which I'm still trying to perfect my grasp of! But at least it's a little more IF -THEN.) So, I'm back to the same recommendation for migrating IRIS users... Just pick a method and give us a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to replicate the entire lighting, climate and security set up most people had with Iris. Then, if we are sufficiently geeky, we can take that apart at our leisure to unlock the full capabilities of Hubitat.
Trust me, I do think documention (How To, examples, whatever) need some love.
But you also have to remember that HE was not created to be an Iris specific transition platform, at some point and at some level Iris users are going to have to transition and evolve to their new platform whatever one they choose.
How is everyone supposed to know how people did something in Iris? Only so many HE users ever used Iris. I used it to only update firmware of my few Iris devices.
Not to be harsh, but how much time and resources is supposed to be used for say the 50% of the 20k something Iris users that transition to HE? And remember, in a few months those documents are going to be as useful as a Iris hub, not useful at all.
I think it would be much more effective for Iris users to ask how to do something and show how they do it in Iris. Then people can give you specific ways of doing it.
“I did this in Iris > this way. How do I do it in Hubitat?”
I can see the value of some kind of an Iris Transition Package - Best Practices for Iris Users or something like that. The problem is, by the time it's done, most of the Iris users will have made their transition to wherever they decide to go and then the value of that work is diminished. It might still be useful to have some "starter" suggested configurations . . .
Everything that I have read online indicates that Lowe's sold an estimated 10-15k hubs. My hub counts in that satistic, despite the fact I switched away from Iris 3 years ago. I doubt Lowe's would have been as generous as they have been with the buyouts if they had anywhere close to 20k active hubs. Considering they're paying users $100 per hub, that figure alone would indicate a $2 million payout. I seriously doubt they're paying out that much more than that across all customers and devices.
I'll second that HE shouldn't focus exclusively on IRIS users making a transition but it would serve HE well to hear users out. I think what I'm missing most from IRIS is the "Scenes" function. A "Scene" was just a list of device actions with no regard to anything else. [Example, Turn on light A, Turn off Thermostat, Turn on Switch, etc.] You could then write a rule that ran the scene. [If 7AM run scene "x"] I loved this because I can craft scenes not only for Home vs. Away but also for "Dogs in Backyard", "Doors and Windows are open", "Im watching a Movie" etc. This was helpful because I would make very complicated scenes that would run with a very simple rule. I would automate 1 rule that ran 1 scene that changed many devices. It would make writing rules simple and would allow you to change automations on the fly. An example would be this, I had 1 rule X that ran 1 scene X for outdoor lighting. This rule ran at sunset and sunrise. I had another rule Y that ran scene X and scene Y that turned on more lights whenever my dogs went outside. Whenever the dogs came inside I simply ran Scene X or did nothing and let the automation run scene X at sunrise. What IRIS let me do was make use of Scene X and Scene Y for as many rules as I pleased. Once Scene X and Scene Y are saved I can run them a myriad of ways by writing a rule. Writing the rule didn't require to edit a long list of devices. I'm not saying HE cant do this so please take my comments with a grain of salt. At the moment it appears that I'll have to edit all the devices I want changed whenever I write a new rule.
You can make a headless Action in RM, and use other rules or triggers to run it. Hubitat also has the Groups and Scenes app, which creates a virtual device to represent that group or scene, which can be turned on or off through other automations.
Sorry for being generous
I read somewhere that there were 18k.
I do agree with @Eric.C.Miller, there should be a “NEW USER - START HERE” thread pinned. But ultimately, outside of Please RTFM, look at the wiki threads, use search, if you can’t find it ask... what else is there?
