Migrating from Smartthings

Neh, we are just Groovy-er here :slight_smile:

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Shares are getting smaller each time someone posts here :wink:

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Thats Good Robert Deniro GIF

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Thanks for the info. Even lack of info is still useful. My Hubitat arrives this evening. I have 2 SmartThings hubs that I am working on replacing. Tonite starts the transition.

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Were it me, I'd get on it now; why wait for something that may be way off? The hubs aren't that expensive, and even if a new one comes along, will it have some new, special, whiz-bang feature you MUST have? I doubt it.

A long time ago it was time to get my mother a new computer. She asked if she should wait because they were always changing. Yes, at that stage, they were. But, virtually everything om the market did what she needed, and then some. I got her a very nice machine, and it lasted her for the rest of her life

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Animated GIF

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We will wait for the noise of a distant explosion.

Seriously: don't let anything intimidate you. The UI is something that - being charitable - is a bit dated, but it is straightforward.

Also: take from a bear who knows. The folks here will get you started if you get lost.

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Also used the ST's act of cutting the cord to move over here. I had started thinking about moving away from ST about a month ago, this was just the final straw.
The forum has been great just over the last couple of hours since I joined. I am glad to see my groovy coding experience won't be wasted. (Just little stuff, but it really simplified automation on the ST side.)

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@AC7SS I'm in the same boat. Over the last 5 years I've written or modified several custom device handlers and smartapps. With the change, I would lose more than half of my devices. It made switching over to Hubitat an easy decision. I'm hopeful that my custom device handlers will mostly work out of the box, but we'll have to see.

I was really dreading using WebCORE. The majority of my usage is automated, with several of the automations being fairly complex (stuff that wouldn't be handled with routines).

It's going to be interesting to see where SmartThings goes from here. They're getting rid of everything that made them so great. I would expect there to be a mass Exodus to other ecosystems once they completely end support for Groovy.

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I would definitely say buy a hub right now. My reasoning for this has to do with how small the cost of a hub is in relation to the overall cost of automating a home. Over the years I have noticed hubitat users fall into a wide spectrum in relation to their expected financial costs in automating their home. On one end of the spectrum you have the users that implement HE as an alternative to hiring a company to install a control 4 automation setup in their home. These users understand that these companies would charge $50 000.00+ to automate thier home and have instead chosen the hubitat route. The have no problem spending $10 000.00 - $20 000.00 on home automation devices and often use a lighting system like Lutron RA2. For them the cost of a hub is neglible and they often have several HE hubs in their set-up. The other end of the spectrum is users who find the hub somewhat expensive and would never even consider Lutron Caseta (never mind ra2) due to the extra cost, for them the cost of each device is a big factor.

For myself, I think I am somewhere in the middle. I am pretty much finished with my home automation and it cost me around $5000 - $7000 CDN ($3500 - $5000USD). For me the cost of a hub is fairly insignificant.

Wherever you put yourself on the above spectrum, I can confidently say HE is a good choice. It works for people all over the financial spectrum. Also the community is great and does not care where you fall on the spectrum. If you end up buying a hub right now and they release another in the future, just buy another one and use both in your setup. The cost is relatively small and there can be advantages in running two hubs.

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100% :+1:

I would say there are also folks who have been lured into Home Automation with promise of super cheap devices handling all their needs. This is true to a point for a very narrow definition of "needs" because once you get beyond the simple timed lighting and motion these simple systems start to become terribly ineffective and limiting. Also the really cheap stuff has a tendency not to last very long compounding the issue.

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I have no inside information.

It has been my experience with electronics/tech that waiting for the upcoming latest and greatest behind the curtain is a losing game.

  1. I miss out on the utility I want today.
  2. The wait turns out to be much longer than I expected.
  3. The improvements are disappointing if they materialize.
  4. I become a beta tester for the new hardware and associated software.
  5. The latest and greatest is yesterday's news in the blink of an eye.
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This...

The best you can do is design a system that is as flexible as possible with the given technologies.

Ability for HE to allow for custom apps and drivers is a very good thing. Also their Maker API app is a huge deal too - allowing external access etc.

That's why I really like the concept of a "companion" server. It's worth the extra complication because it gives the ability (depending on what you include) for much greater expansion capabilities with minimal impact to the HE hub.

After porting over your apps/drivers, I hope you (and anyone else coming from ST) will consider releasing them in the Code Share section of our forum here and including them in Hubitat Package Manager. Extensive community-built apps and drivers are one of the key strengths of HE.

HPM:

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I've been (mostly) migrating our home over from ST to HE. We are at about 120 devices, with some pretty extensive home theatre integrations, pile of HUE stuff, and some Webcore stuff running the pool solar heating system. I bought a C7 hub a year ago and played a bit but the sheer volume and time suck nature of a migration had me deterred.

Then ST announced the Groovy thing.

Over the last two weeks I've migrated everything over including all the pool automation stuff (old to new instance of Webcore), locks, kitchen induction cooktop/fan automations, all our main floor lighting, all the garage bits (including door automation) leaving only the home theatre bits in ST. 90% of the lighting is HUE, so I can control these via HT or ST.

All of the ST Zigbee devices were fast and painless to reset / rejoin HE.

Figuring out how to set up Motion Lighting Automations, integrating disable motion/lighting scenes options via a few Aeotec mini motes ate up a bunch of time but are working well now.

So it was a time suck as expected, but I'm quite happy with the result. Bulk of the time, was spent figuring out how to reset devices (especially older Zwave stuff) and in some cases removing them ( door locks) to include them physically close to HE. I had some excellent assistance from @christi999 who essentially wrote new drivers for some older pool sensors. based on the Fibaro FGK-10x door sensors with DS18B20 external sensors.

I'm pretty tickled with the performance on HE hub :slight_smile:

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Wait until the next time you try and get online and realize the internet is down but your house kept "working" like its supposed to. I still remember the first time that happened to me. It's a great feeling not to be dependent on the cloud for the core functions of your home.

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if its been sat have you confirmed that you have done the z-wave firmware update. this is separate from the hub update and is found on the z-wave settings page. I don't want that bighting you later :slight_smile:

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Yes..did that straight up before adding devices :slight_smile:

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I got a bit of another kick when finding out 2 days back that Harmony / ST integration breaks with groovy ending as well...with no replacement even hinted at.

After spending a lot of time on theatre automation as well as our living area media center, I was not looking forward to recreating all of that in HE. The saviour was HUE's integration with Harmony, taking care of the "Home Control" buttons on the Elite 950 remotes/hubs we use. Then for icing, the very nice Harmony to Hubitat integration got me very quickly working with the new Lighting app to sort out everything more or less in an evening. I previously had virtual switches, multiple scenes, CORE etc. along with ST/Harmony to make everything work.

So, again, I was surprised I was able to port everything to HE ( I was planning on leaving media/theatre automations in ST originally) in relatively quick time using just the lighting app and one "switch" from each Harmony hub. Awesome sauce!

I also added "sleepover mode" (triggered by a minimote) as my daughters regularly have friends over and the theatre/basement area doubles as the hang out. That mode changes up motion triggers so just a few lights come on at 5% in the basement area so the girls can sleep without being hassled by motion triggers/full lighting scenes.

Having one lighting automation which covers all modes, scenarios and incorporates conditions for activation/off is pretty impressive once you figure it out.

This was part of a basement gut and reno that took me about 2 years to finish. There is a pile of noise attenuation stuff going on, along with acoustic treatments to complement the dual sub, 11 channel ATMOS setup. An acoustically transparent 125" screen drops down in front of the smaller TV so between the two "media modes", all the amps/subs/accessories and HUE led lights, the key to making it all usable for the family is 100% the Harmony/Elite remotes and automation! Hats off Hubitat folks.

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