I'm already doing far more in just a short time than I ever did in the entire time with Wink.
I just had a custom notification speak over my Sonos in my office regarding a door left open and I'm sitting here cracking up. This is going to be so much fun.
I had the absolute sweetest mailbox routine before that I am going to convert to hubitat and I'll post the 'recipe' on here. I can already tell that the Rules app is going to let me do everything I need and more.
A huge thank you to the Hubitat team for creating such a great product! I did my homework before I switched so I didn't have any trouble with my schlage locks, zwave garage door openers or anything else. A cheap powerline adapter is a great tool when you need to move the hub around your property for initial pairing purposes.
im about a month and a half into hubitat since leaving wink. the honeymoon stage is sweet. I am now in the stage where i have discovered this thing can do so much, i want to cry in the corner figuring out how to make things happen that serve no practical purpose. but i know i can do it so lets figure it out mode. LOL.
Yes @TechMedX I'll need all kinds of stuff. The mailbox setup uses a generic zwave sensor and triggers when the mailman comes (it can differentiate between mailman & someone getting the mail) to play Blue's Clues 'MAIL TIME!' over Sonos and shoots a text to everyone in the family's phones the mail is here (lol) then when someone retrieves the mail later plays Blue's Clues "We just got a letter..wonder who its from." and texts everyone that someone already picked the mail up so don't look. It requires a combination of 'on/off' switching which takes place on both open and close mailbox events as well as a scheduled task to reset everything properly for the next day. Should be pretty easy to build using a combination of notifications, schedules and rule machine in Hubitat. Looking forward to putting it all back together.
Welcome to HE and nice to know you are having a good start. Your mail notification sounds interesting. What's the secret for the differentiate between mailman & someone getting the mail? I am really interested in this.
real quick because i want to post the entire thing later but essentially everyone in my house knows this is setup and they don't check the mailbox in the morning. I know the mailman comes sometime after 10am so any open/close event prior to that is ignored and likewise any open/close event after the mail has been retrieved is ignored as open/close events are turned off at 10pm and then all 4 events are fully reset at midnight each day. This eliminates almost all false positives.
The 4 events below do most of the heavy lifting:
mailman open event (reset to active every day at midnight)
mailman close event (reset to active every day at midnight)
other person open event (reset to inactive every day at 10pm)
other person close event (reset to inactive every day at 10pm)
So really all I had to do is wait for the first time mailbox opens event after 10am and play the blues clues clip, email and text notifications and activate the other person open event
Next when the mailman closes the mailbox (2nd e vent above) i activate other person close event and inactivate the mailman open event.
Now the mailbox is ready for someone who was notified to pick the mail up. The other person open event plays the 'you just got a letter, notifications, texts etc. and inactivate the mailman close event. When closed i deactivate the other person opened mailbox and we're done. The other person closed mailbox is technically still in an active state until the nightly reset but it doesn't hurt anything to be left on.
The beauty of this solution is
A. if nobody ever picks up the mail, no worries, the midnight reset gets the mailbox ready for the next day regardless
B. if someone picks the mail up after 10PM i don't blast the house w/ Sonos because I disable the triggers at that time WAF required me to fix this almost from day one.
C. if more than one person opens the mailbox because they didn't get the text, no worries as the trigger will only fire once.
There are a couple of community apps on here you can use for exactly your case.
My mailman does not have a standard time for delivery and my kids/wife check the mailbox at random times as well. I have a rule to check my front gate because of this.
I agree with the transition from wink. I've had mine for about a week now, and I haven't even moved anything over from wink just got some new sensors to get used to it before moving things over (especially since they extended free use) so my wife and kids don't have to go thru growing pains making sure everything is set up and working properly. I'll probably start moving things over next week and intergrating with a few of my new sensors (never got motion or door window sensors until now, but decided they would be useful in a few places so new hub was a great excuse to buy some).
Have to say I liked your mailbox idea so much i did it yesterday.
Just used a zigbee motion sensor from china and get a text when ever mailbox is opened.
Yay! I'm modifying it slightly since I like the new 'sonos text to speech' feature and I'm wanting to set that up in a randomizer so it will say different things.
yeah i have a rubbermaid style box. you are correct in that once a metal mailbox closes it loses contact. @bill.whitaker used a zigbee sensor so i'm wondering if he had better luck than using a zwave sensor.
wow! thats great to hear. I tried 2 different metal mailboxes on my cheap go control zwave sensor but no cigar. on the plus side the sensor has been going strong 4 years now without replacing the battery.
Another Wink refugee, this time from Canada. I'm less than 2 weeks in and I'm doing things with my Hubitat that I only dreamed of doing with my Wink.
In many regards, I'm glad that Wink cut the cord. I've privately bemoaned their shortcomings for years and their little extortion stunt was just the motivation I needed to say goodbye!
While the cloud has its place, there are some things that should just be done locally and Hubitat makes that very easy to do.
Also a Wink refugee here, but with a bit of a counterpoint to the love-fest that is this thread.
I've been very frustrated trying to get up and running with my new Hubitat. I've only got a few devices so far, but none of them are working for me. Finally found that a Leviton wall switch that had worked fine with Wink for years is out of date and should be replaced. OK. Then I wanted to get my Chamberlain MyQ garage door opener controller working, and after reading lots of threads here, loading code from github, trying this and that, I still can't get it to do anything.
But the final straw came today when I had given up and decided it was time to send it back, and try something else. So I sent an email to Hubitat stating some of my issues, and acknowledging that I'd gone over the 30-day return policy. The response I received a few hours later read, in full:
We’re sorry to hear of your problems. We don’t accept returns past 30 days.
Let's just say I was quite disappointed by this level of (lack of) customer service.
I don't know what to do now. I hate to just chuck this thing, now that I've spent $140 on it, but how much more time am I going to waste banging my head against the wall?
I had read so much good about Hubitat before I purchased it that I was sure it was going to be a great alternative to Wink. And I must say these forums are a wealth of information, full of people who really know their stuff. Maybe I'm just stupid.
I've got a spare raspberrypi laying around, maybe I'll give Home Assistant a try.
Anyway thanks for letting me vent.
sorry to hear that. just FYI i hate myQ. i sold mine years ago and went with a linear zwave control that i'm pretty happy with. no problems with hubitat.
as for the leviton i'd be curious which model you had and what device type you paired it as? i have some very VERY old leviton zwave switches i bought used off eBay probably 6 years ago and no problems whatsoever pairing or using them.
yes there's a bit of learning curve here but i've actually been surprised and happy that my quirky trippers, tapts and outlinks which i thought were destined for the trash heap actually work fine w/ hubitat and in fact, aside from that dumb wifi surge protector from quirky, i think everything i own moved over without issues.
again, i can't speak for myq because i hate chamberlain's business model on that thing but your leviton switches should be fine. what else were you having trouble with?
WAF required me to fix this almost from day one.
