I searched and couldn’t find an answer to my question on these forums. I just got my first few devices set up on Hubitat today. I have Caseta switches throughout my house so I ordered the Smart Bridge Pro 2 to integrate with Hubitat.
But then I got to thinking. If I have the Smart Bridge, which can integrate with Alexa, why should I even connect it to Hubitat?
We pretty much only use Alexa to interact with our lights. What are the upsides of connecting the bridge to Hubitat and then to Alexa vs. connection directly to Alexa with the Lutron skill.
If you use the Hubitat Lutron integration, it communicates directly with a Lutron Caseta pro bridge on your LAN via Telnet (that’s why you need the pro bridge, the non-pro version doesn’t have telnet capability).
Alexa’s integration with Lutron, like everything Alexa does, is cloud-to-cloud.
That’s a huge advantage, IMO.
If you have no need to integrate the Lutron devices with any Hubitat automations, then I suppose you don't. You may find that you want to do this, however--say to use a Z-Wave or Zigbee motion sensor on Hubitat to turn on a Lutron switch/dimmer with Motion Lighting or a similar app/automation. My favorite--and lots of people's, it seems--is to take Lutron Picos into Hubitat for use as button devices you can use to control anything Hubitat can, like non-Lutron lights, hub mode, or about anything you can imagine.
As mentioned above, Hubitat would also get you local control as opposed to the Alexa cloud integration. You'd also get the ability to truly automate--as in my motion-lighting example above--beyond the simplicity of Alexa Routines, which in the long run you (and anyone you might live with) will probably find less annoying than constantly needing voice control or an app. Lutron can do some of this natively too, but adding Hubitat lets you use any device beyond just those Lutron supports in-app.
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Great! This is exactly the info I was looking for. I didn’t realize the Telnet vs. cloud distinction, and I agree that is a huge advantage.
Also, the ability to use a Pico remote for anything on my Hubitat network could be huge...
Thanks for the quick answers.
As you gain more experience with home automation, you will reach a point where you become irritated yelling at your house to get lights to turn on and off, and you will learn to use contact sensors and motion sensors to cause your house to turn lights on and off as you go about your normal life. At some point you will look back and be amazed that you ever turned switches on and off manually, or asked Alexa to do it. You notice it most when you go on a trip and stay in a hotel. That’s when you realize how automated your house has become. And, you will see the true value when you lose Internet connectivity for an extended time, and everything keeps working with Hubitat.
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Perhaps. Our current house is small enough that we either have all the lights on or none of them and the natural light is so good, that we often don’t have lights on at all. A couple of the lights and our exterior lights are on sunrise/sunset routines. I could definitely see us moving toward motion sensors in the future though, possibly when we buy a bigger house.