Just pulled the trigger on HE this last weekend. Arrived today and I was able to exclude all my Z-Wave devices and remove all the Zigbee devices from ST fairly quickly, then add them to HE. With the exception of one GoControl lamp dimmer that won't go into inclusion mode, everything was seamless.
The only struggle I had was finding out how to integrate with Google Home, but that was more a moment of forgetting how to navigate Google's menus more than anything else.
With Google Home my wife can still voice control the lights connected to the Lutron SmartBridge (pro arrives next week so no local processing yet).
The only thing I am missing is a native android App with functional presence sensor, but coming from ST, the Android presence sensor never worked consistently across 3 different phones. I guess what I want is easy, consistent, no fuss or hassle presence functionality, like an Android app that on connect grabs the WiFi AP MAC address and if it matches your home AP, cross references other location data from the phone and can update to "present".
Otherwise this is a fantastic product, more responsive than ST could ever hope to be and if you have futzed around with ST for 3 years trying to keep things working, the basics of HE should not be intimidating.
Bravo, cannot wait to see where it goes from here. Will be selling the migration to all the other home automation nerds in my social sphere.
One thing I am trying to do is move forward in a simple fashion. Getting the simple things working well first.
I have a few GH things going on - they were some "critical lighting issues" life saving kinda stuff (the ones my wife uses the most). Other than that I am just getting lights/motion/contact thermostats all setup and working correctly and the scenes all local. I am trying to avoid getting it all done TODAY.
This includes google home - we're a definite GH family but as you know making a change in one place is difficult to update in the other. So I figure once my HE is pretty stabilized and I have things like I want them.... then move onto GH.
You may be different - but getting my head around RM is my biggest curve right now. Avoided "trying" to get WebCore to work with HE - too many reported problems and RM can do just about everything you need, it's just more thought involved.
I'm having very good luck with the Life360 integration, and enabling Driving Mode in the L360 app on my phone. This keeps location services on while driving, and yields very good presence results.
This is a battery drain of course, but I've adapted by keeping my phone plugged into the charger in my car on anything other than short trips. Can be a PITA but it's worth the improved accuracy.
I am with @destructure00 that Life360 is freaking awesome on HE. Unfortunately the geofence is HUGE but that is true with all geofence solutions (HomeKit, WebCORE, etc). So automation of garage doors isn't ideal. Great example is our home is near a main road. My daughter drives up and down that road to visit friends. Life360 flags her all the time as "Daughter just arrived Home" and then 2 minutes later "Daughter has just left Home." That would suck to have the garage door open/close each time this happened.
So I am currently researching how to leverage @ogiewon's Hubduino project to place a WiFi device into vehicles for a smaller geofence to enable home automations accordingly.
WebCORE was really cool on ST but to be honest I figured out how to do all my automation with RM now. Wasn't as hard as expected and as soon as I came up with a good naming taxonomy I was able to easily string multiple simple rules together to accommodate a very complex rule in WebCORE.
x2...for me it required a little bit of a mental shift in the way I think about automations as well as adapting to the taxonomy differences between the two, but once I got the hang of it, moving the automations over to RM was fairly straightforward. I actually prefer RM now to what I had set up in WC.
I use a combination of HomeKit geolocation via homebridge and WiFi connect/disconnect via my TP link router and IFTTT. I use Rule Machine to trigger one switch when I enter the Geo location and then the second one when we hit the Wi-Fi range, and the combination of the two makes the rule true and from that, I do some action based on that truth. This prevents false triggers from walking within the geofence area, but not coming up to my house, or false triggers due to disconnecting from Wi-Fi because of whatever.
But you have Android phones, so you could use IFTTT for geolocation and one of the supported routers for connect/disconnect and IFTTT. Works well and doesn’t drain the phones battery.
It’s specific TP Link, ASUS and Google Wi-Fi that support the IFTTT integration I believe. One of them, ASUS I believe, only supports connect triggers via IFTTT, not disconnect, or vice versa don’t remember which.
I’m using the TP Link Deco M5, which I like in every way except the fact that you’re limited to 16 DHCP address reservations for some reason.
I have requested IFTTT to add support for EERO so I can do what you are doing for WiFi presence. Can't do it currently hence why I am looking at another creative option.
He is able to narrow the geofence to within 5-10 feet verses the typical 150-200feet. This is huge as you can then begin doing cool automation like turn on lights outside when someone is actually there.
@Cobra does a lot of this using the ST presence device with the AA battery mod in his vehicles. Really cool idea overall.
Yeah, you need a two-stage trigger. If you just do it with the Geofence, as mentioned, when you’re just walking by in the neighborhood or you are driving by It can trigger automations you don’t want to go happen at that point, like unlock your door! If you just use Wi-Fi presence, that can also give undesired results when, for example your WiFi drops and comes back on. With that being the only trigger, it would register as if you just came home, even though you’re already there.
I know most of you are trying to completely automate the arrival and not have to physically do anything however has anyone tried using a Pico? They make a visor clip and can push the button as you get close. I haven’t personally tried yet don’t know the range.
I'm having FAR better results with Life360. The only downside is that it's a proper monitoring app, in that there's no way I'll ever be able to convince anyone to actually use it. Having something that just runs in the background and only said "I'm here!" (or, "I'm there" if using other fences) might be easier to convince the grown kids to use.
Still, although I'm longing for an app, and it'd be nice having integrated presence... That takes a lot of specialized skill - developing for permissions and battery savings implementations, and all that. No offense to the Hubitat developers, but I have a feeling if they try it, they'll end up with a half-baked solution like ST's that works a solid 60% of the time and probably drives a quarter of their support tickets.
