Super excited to be moving on from my Vera which has been causing me problems for a while now and as a result it has lessened my enthusiasm for continuing on HA.
I ordered my Hubitat yesterday, but only after the order did I start to check on compatibility and had a small onset of panic as I noticed that perhaps my Fibaro gear was not fully supported.
This is what I am using and what I think is supported already on Hubitat (based on the Wiki):
Device
Supported ?
Aeotec Extender
No
Aeotec Multisensor 6 Gen 5
Yes
Everspring Siren SE812
No
Fibaro Dimmer FGD-211
No
Fibaro Door-Window Sensor FGK-10x
No
Fibaro Motion Sensor FGMS-001
Yes
Fibaro RGBW cont. FGRGBWM-441
Yes
Fibaro Double Switch FGB-2x3
No
Fibaro Smoke Sensor FGSD-002
No
Fibaro Univeral Sensor FGBS-321
No
Fibaro Wall Plug FGWPx-101
Yes ?
Fibaro Flood and Temp Sensor FGFS-101
Yes
RFTRX
No
So, as you can see, the results are not great and in fact, only 5 of my Devices seem to be supported, leaving 8 unsupported. Now, my question is, will I be able to get these up and running on the Hubitat via the Generic profile, or will I have issues with most of these ?
My main use for HA is for electric heating. I use the Universal Sensor with temp sensors to relay the temp in each room in my house and then start electric heaters that are connected to the Fibaro wall switches.
On the Vera I have a virtual thermostat for this, which has intelligence to allow for a Comfort and Away setting. Would I somehow be able to replicate this on the Hubitat ? Has anyone got a similar setup going ?
All in all, I hope that Hubitat will work for me, but right now I am feeling a bit of buyers remorse, so is anyone able to ease my mind ?
Thanks for the quick reply. That means 2 more devices that I can hopefully use in my new setup.
I hope that Hubitat will look into supporting more FIbaro devices. It seems that it already supports more Fibaro devices than Smartthings and I quite like the Fibaro line-up. One would wonder why I didn´t just go for the Fibaro hub
Congrats! I made the switch from Vera about a month ago. I'm very happy with the switch and got excited about HA again. If you were a heavy user of PLEG there will be a mind shift needed as you adjust to Rule Manager. Pleg could use the time stamp of last truth and last false, those are not available in RM. I've been able to get everything working the way I want using different logic.
Thanks Drew. I'm hoping that I will be re-energized. I don´t have the patience to wait for Vera to sort themselves out. I was never a big user of PLEG as I thought it was a bit too complicated. The Hubitat rule interface seems to be quite nice and since I wasn´t a user of PLEG I come untainted to the party
I think there are plenty of Vera users that want to make the switch, but you may be right that more things need to be integrated and happen before many power users will make the plunge to hubitat.
I myself am not a power user, although I consider myself above average. I originally considered Home Assistant, but quickly find out that I would spend to much time tinkering, and that is not my goal. I just want a set & forget system.
Edit: I invited Bravenel (Bruce to this topic to get his input. Still learning this nice forum
For the "things" to be integrated, Hubitat supports nearly any Z-Wave and ZigBee HA 1.2-compatible device. For ones that don't work with a stock driver, you can also import (or write) custom drivers--pretty much any Z-Wave or ZigBee HA device that works on another platform should work here. Hubitat also has integrations for many popular LAN devices (e.g., Hue, Sonos), but there obviously needs to be an open/documented API (or a partnership between Hubitat and the manufacturer) for this to work.
I'd guess that the 433 MHz and similar RF devices that some people use on other platforms are unlikely to be natively supported by Hubitat hardware, since most of its developers (and probably users) come from platforms where standard Z-Wave and ZigBee are the RF protocols of choice. However, someone could use an RFLink gateway (Nodo or similar) and integrate them into Hubitat via the LAN if they were dedicated enough. Are there other kinds of devices I'm missing here? (I've used SmartThings, Vera, and Home Assistant, though not a lot of Vera, so I really don't know what people are using device-wise; like Hubitat, ST is mostly geared towards Z-Wave, ZigBee, and compatible LAN devices, and Vera strikes me primarily as a Z-Wave controller, the ZigBee-enabled Plus that only supports a handful of devices and has no way to use custom devices notwithstanding).
I'm curious what the "more things need to happen" part of the post means, however. Given the ability to write custom apps (automations) or use the built-in Rule Machine to do the same, the possibilities are practically endless and quite powerful. Hubitat just has to "know" about the devices, which again, custom drivers can make happen for the common standard protocols. If you share specific tasks you'd like Hubitat to accomplish that you could do with Vera and can't here, I'm sure someone would have some ideas--if the devices themselves work, the rest (setting up automations?) could just be a paradigm shift that requires thinking about the problem differently.
Don´t get me wrong, I think the promise of this controller is what I am looking for, and hopefully it will fulfill that once I get it.
What I mean about "more things need to happen" is better native support for same/similar Z-Wave devices as in Vera, that would mean the full stack of Fibaro (although Vera also does not fully support some), but of course I am mostly thinking about my own situation here
The other things I have seen some Vera users mention are quite specific things with regards to being able to copy the secure Z-Wave key and other very specialized things, but they are also not supported on other hubs or extremely complex automation done with PLEG. I am not interested in this myself and I have been on the fence for a few months now to jump to another hub as there has been nothing worthwhile going on at Vera, and despite the recent acquisition I don't see any things change for the next 6 months or more and then you would almost have a new beta system anyway, so I am glad I am taking the plunge and I just hope that I can get my main devices up and running.
I don´t know yet if I will be able to develop/edit my own driver, so that is were I count on Hubitat or other community developers to help me, and others with same devices. I wouldn't mind paying a few dollars for the right drivers.
I was contemplating going with Homeseer, but I am not a fan of their "pay high prices for everything you would ever want to possibly use" policy.
As for my RFTRX 433mhz devices, I only own a few and I wouldn't mind changing them for proper Zigbee or Z-Wave, so not a problem here.
As I have mentioned in my post, I am not doing anything that requires any complex things, and my most used functionality would be the thermostat I mention. Until I have the device in hand I can´t see what is available, but I just wanted to see if someone had already done similar things so I could jump right in once the device arrives.
I am looking forward to the journey and I hope that I can both learn from the current owners and later convey those learnings back to the community.
For device compatiblity, an unofficial tip is that if there isn't a native Hubitat driver and you can't find anything in the Hubitat Community forum, try searching the SmartThings Community forum for a "device type handler" (or DTH or device handler), the equivalent of "drivers" on that platform. Most DTHs will port quite easily from ST to Hubitat (you can do most of it yourself with find-and-replace but I'm sure people here would love to help if you don't feel comfortable doing so), and if it's a Z-Wave or ZigBee device that works on ST, it's likely to work here, too.
Hubitat does indeed not support copying the secure Z-Wave key, though besides Home Assistant (where I needed to configure it myself) I'm not sure how many other platforms do. I never got the hang of PLEG on Vera, but Hubitat has both Rule Machine and the ability to write custom apps in Groovy, plus an array of native apps and commnunity apps here, which will save you from having to write so much logic yourself in the first place (ST and Hubitat are the only platforms I've used where the concept of apps, sort of "templates" for automations where you plug in devices and other parameters, eixsts--it seems like most make you write all your automations from nothing).
Looks like we both said "no" to HomeSeer for the same reason.
For the thermostat, you can create something custom in Rule Manager based on how you want to handle switching between "comfort" and "away," or you can hope that Bruce will introduce a "thermostat manager"-type app in a future firmware update as has been hinted: Thermostat scheduler app like Mode Manager. I also have a custom app that turns my thermostat down (in the winter) when I'm away, in my case based entirely on motion sesnors and when they stop seeing movement for a specified period of time (not quite what you want and putting it back on the equivalent of "comfort" is a manual operation, but it's something): [RELEASE] Turn Thermosat Up/Down When Away (based on motion sensors). Other people likely have similar setups. It's definitely something an app (or rule) can handle in any case!
