I've made the decision to move from SmartThings to Hubitat (Recently moved from Wink to ST) and am planning my configuration in advance of my Hubitat arriving (Saturday hopefully)
Let me preface this by saying that my wife is not a huge fan of the HA in the house - So I need to ensure that there are switch options in as many places as possible. Two of the areas that I have historically "Rigged" a solution for have been 1) My Kitchen and 2) My Garage.
In the Kitchen - Quite a ways back, I was fortunate enough to participate in user testing on the Eaton Halo LED Downlights - They are Zigbee 2.0 and have dimming, color and on/off control - I installed 5 of these in the kitchen and "Hotwired the lights (Constant power) and provided local control via a Lutron Connected Bulb Remote that interfaced with the Wink Hub and controlled the 5 lights. The LCBR was installed in the switch box that previously housed the switch for the lights. This set up gave me control via Wink and Alexa and also provided local control at the switch location via the LCBR.
In the garage I started with one switch that controlled one bulb location in the ceiling and another bulb location with constant power (Used pull string to Control the light originally). I "Hotwired the switch" (constant power) and modified the bulb location by adding a z-wave plug to it and then added an additional plug location by fishing a wire in the joist bay that I installed another z-wave plug into the second (newly added) outlet location. In the second location noted above (constant hot, controlled by a pull string) I added a Z-Wave Relay (Enerwave Z-Wave Plus relay from Amazon) and added that relay to the hub
All three of the light locations are controlled via the Hub for automation purposes and via an installed LCBR for local control.
Before I pull out the Smart Can Lights in the kitchen and the Z-wave plugs in the garage and replace all of that with Z-wave dimmers (which I would rather not do) - Will I be able to control these locations with the LCBR similar to the way that I was able to do via wink?
Appreciate the input...First post here in Hubitat forums!
The LCBR remote doesn't work with Hubitat the way it worked with Wink. This is because Hubitat doesn't support inbound zigbee group messaging, and there are no immediate plans to support inbound zigbee group messaging.
But you can get them to work in the following way with zigbee bulbs (so an LCBR cannot directly control the z-wave outlet in your garage, but more on that later).
For zigbee bulbs (eg. your Kitchen):
Pair the bulbs to Hubitat
Pair the LCBR to Hubitat (it will show up as a "device" - just leave it as that)
Pair the LCBR to the bulbs
It will continue to work as it did with Wink to control those bulbs, and the bulbs will remain controllable by Hubitat (so Alexa, Google etc will work).
For Z-wave bulbs:
The simplest solution will be to replace both bulbs with zigbee bulbs. But the following suggestion will work if you can replace at least one of the bulbs with a zigbee bulb
Do steps 1-3 as outlined above for the zigbee bulb and the LCBR. Then install the built-in mirror app, such that the state of the controlled outlet (on/off) is taken from the zigbee bulb.
The better solution under Hubitat would be to sell all your LCBRs on eBay, where they seem to go for a premium, and replace them with a Lutron Caseta Pro Bridge and Lutron Pico remotes.
There is another way to integrate the LCBR with Hubitat without pairing it to a zigbee bulb. And that is to pair the LCBR to zigbee2mqtt and then use one of a multitude of ways to integrate zigbee2mqtt with Hubitat.
I have one remaining LCBR, and this is the approach I use with it. But it takes time and effort to set it all up to work smoothly. Zigbee2mqtt and Hubitat both integrate with a platform called Node-RED, so I use that combination to bring my LCBR into Hubitat, with the sequence shown below.
The lutron Bridge may be a better alternative for the garage. Do i need the Pro Bridge or can I use the L-BDG2 (I have one of those from a previous UX test)
The model you want is "L-BDGPRO2-WH". I did the same as you. I used the Lutron Caseta Smart Bridge with Home Assistant, which permitted control of dimmers/switches, but not Pico remotes.
When I moved to HE, I sold the Smart Bridge on eBay and replaced it with a Caseta Smart Bridge Pro 2. FWIW, here's a comparison of the two:
Pico remotes are about $12-15. While LCBRs sell on eBay for $50-75. You could partly recoup the cost of the pro bridge and a few Picos by selling all your LCBRs.
