Missing things in HE that are great in Wink

I've been a convert from Wink to HE for 6months or so now and am loving it, including being as active as possible in this community.

Having said that, given Wink's even more recent troubles and an influx of users, it made me realize I have not articulated the few things I still miss from Wink. My goal here is to engage in good conversation on the Gaps v.s. possible solutions.

Wink Gap Features

Easily Accessible Global Activity

Wink had an awesome page where you could go glance and get a sense of what actions have happened, and how they were triggered. E.g. you could see your Lights turned on and who (person name) or what (trigger, alexa, robot, etc.) caused the action. It was also an awesome way to understand why something happened (e.g. Siren went off).

I have yet to find a similar tool in HE for this as the logs are way more verbose and there isn't any good attributions that I can find.

The Wink solution felt like a good sweet spot between being generally useful for anyone (e.g. my wife would frequent it) while also being a fantastic tool to trouble-shoot and understand your system (e.g. Me).

Home Sitter

Wink had a specific app/scenario for your lights where it would simulate being home when you were away on on vacation. In particular two specific features;

  1. Randomize Lights on/off in a pattern that mimics human behavior
  2. Play music on your device (Sonos) to also mimic being away

Moonlight

Wink has a mode similar to "Home sitter" that makes it incredibly easy to setup, turn off and add/remove devices to follow sunset/sunrise and any deltas.

Sonos Integration

The Wink native Sonos integration is superior as it allows you to control playback, playlists, favorites, etc a lot more seamlessly.

Solutions

Easily Accessible Global Activity Solutions

None.
I have not found any at all here, besides Dashboard per tile history hunting on a

Sonos Solutions

  • RM lets you achieve some of this, but with complications. In particular playlist support is incredibly painful.
  • Running a NodeJS server with Sonos HTTP is a great solution but introduces yet another system and fail-point.

HomeSitter Solutions

  1. I personally use Alexa Guard as my solution for lights here, which I trigger thanks to the great Alexa integration with HE. I have not found a good solution for the Sonos piece outside of complex RMs I'm trying out (Community App opportunity!

  2. @bptworld has the Fantastic "At Home Simulator" app

  3. Vacation Light Director Port - Note I have not tried this.

Moonlight Solutions

  1. I have found success with the built in Simple Automation Rule app which has much improved lately.

That's all I have, I'm happy to keep this first post up-to-date as people suggestion solutions and or any other constructive gaps we should consider as a community.

Edit: It's worth pointing out, HE is 1,000 times better than Wink. I'm focusing on the 2% items here that I miss from Wink, and not speaking to the 98% of why HE is so much better.

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For activity, have you gone into the Device tab, selected a device, and go into "Events"? (top left corner)

That shows all events for a particular device, similar to Wink.

Yeah, but that is for a specific device, similar to the history tab on the device tile in dashboards as well.

In wink you have an over-all activity tab that is chronological for all your devices and meaningful events with attributions for who/what did it.

E.g. Say you see a light is left on, you can go to the history and you'd see something like:

  • Living Room Light turned on (Alexa Guard)
  • Front Door locked (Joe Black)
  • Sonos Upstairs paused (Music Robot Trigger)
  • Outside light turned on (Home sitter)

Do you happen to have a screen shot as an example to better visualize it, please?

You can turn on logging for all devices, or relevant devices, and see that in logs, past logs. If you really want to ramp up the logs, turn on debugging log option in the device, but that really creates lots of events.

I leave my door locks and door contact sensors with logging on for just this reason. It is easy to track in the logs. They are the only thing I leave logging turned on permanently.

I just plugged in my Wink but the log is, no surprise, empty. The activity screen looks like this. (Random photo off the Googles.)

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I like this Global Activity view - would be nice to have something similar in HE and it has both casual user and diagnostic benefit.

What I particularly like is it shows what app / device / person initiated the change. I don’t think that information is available in HE.

For me for example knowing that my MQTT app initiated a device state change would really help in stopping potential loops on updates from MQTT

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Agreed. So many times my wife would as me something like "Who left the door unlocked" or left a light on, etc. And we could clearly see if it was Her, Me, Alexa trigger or a Robot I had programmed.

For functionality along the lines of home sitter:

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Bryan @bptworld has some great apps, like At Home Simulator you should try.

The easiest way to get many of his apps (and other contributors too) is to install Hubitat Package Manager, and it will automagically install things for you.

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