New hub at parents house

Hello,
I need some best practices from the community. I bought two new C7?hubs for my parents and my in laws house that I plan to set up whilst I’m home.

  1. What can I set up on my network ahead of time? Will I have to hit the little network reset button when I move it?

  2. Do I set up a VPN to troubleshoot or do I get remote management?

  3. What else am I missing?

My parents love the automation and voice control (apple in one house and Google in the other) but i have to do all of the set up and troubleshooting

I’m migrating both from smart things. The recent update broke all of the back end automatons I had set up for them

If you just leave it on DHCP you can move it to a new location and it will grab a new IP from the new router. Then if desired you can then set a static IP, or set a static DHCP entry.

Personally I prefer the VPN, gives access to the whole network including the hub. I have one relative where I setup a VPN on the router mainly to check on the router itself and it is very reliable.

Not going to be able to set much up, maybe install some app and driver code if you need any. Otherwise you need the devices available to do the fun stuff.

You could create virtual devices and setup the rules before hand. Then just replace the actual devices for the virtual ones.

Good point, that could work. You can even use the "Swap Apps" feature in the Settings to swap it all to the actual devices. As long as the new devices are not "child" devices from an app or parent device it will work great.

I love the virtual device idea!

Sadly they both have hue lights which are child devices right?

Can I do some sort of abstraction? Make a group that uses a virtual placeholder light and then sub in hue lights?

I don’t believe so, but would love to be proven wrong.

If you plan to setup groups anyway, you could setup Room Lights with either a virtual device or possibly even no devices, then add the real devices to the RL setup later.

You could program some automations right into RL and anything else could be done in RM. RM now allows the direct activation of RL instances without creating an activator.

I just spent the past 3.5 days setting up a HE C7 at my mother's house. To attempt to get ahead of the curve, I set up Modes, address, Lat/Lon, Rooms. That was about all I could do without any devices handy. Never thought about setting up virtual switches. What a grand idea!

On location:
I paired 6 Zigbee contact switches. Set up Remote access, 3 Hue motion sensors. Had to relocate some outdoor flood lights. Removed existing dumb motion sensors. Installed a couple of Zooz dimmers. Eventually 10 Zooz switches/dimmers and 1 Enbrighten Zigbee dimmer to act as a relay for the yard sensor. 1 Zooz relay contact (ran out of switches). 1 Zooz relay tied to smoke detectors Adjusted sensor areas. Flood light areas. Got back home tonight at dark. During the course of the coming week, I will set up and tweak the rules.

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Just to finish up, I set up a Hubitat at both the in-laws and my parents house. Virtual devices proved not so useful, because apparently hue devices are child devices. So I spent extra time deleting a bunch of virtual devices that I made. Virtual devices probably would have been useful if my lights weren’t hue

The plus side is that I was able to think through a lot of the rules with the virtual devices in a much calmer, non holiday with kids running around, environment

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