HELP! I am attempting to set up the start of my "Smart Home" outside in my outdoor living/kitchen area. I am a construction contractor so the electrical part I can do in my sleep, however I consider myself knowledgeable and capable but not very tech savvy. I've done a fair amount of Google/YouTube/fourm searching with limited luck. I'll give a brief synopsis of my setup, my goal, and the issues I've run into so far in hopes one (or several) of you finds a soft spot in your heart to help a noob out.
I've had a Sonos Connect setup through a receiver and speaker selector with local volume controls throughout the house for whole home audio for about 5-6 years. Gear I've purchased recently to make this attempt: HE, mesh network, several sonoff smart relays to turn on/off individual outdoor receptacles, Bond Bridge for ceiling fans/lights, a few smart dimmers for can lights, and a Fire 10.1 tablet to use as the dedicated dashboard.
Issue #1 - I figured out myself, you can't access the hubitat configuration screen from a Chromebook it appears. Didn't see anything about that online. I only assume that's the case as I tried a regular PC and was able to do it, where on the Chromebook the "Connect to My hub" button always came back as unreachable.
Issue #2 - I'm currently under construction finishing this project so I don't have all my devices setup, but I do have the ceiling fans hung so I set up the bond bridge through it's app, which is working perfectly. In the hubitat control panel, I added the bond app and found my unit through it. I then created a small simple dashboard with 2 buttons, fan speed dimmer, and light dimmer... But I can't get it to actually control the fans or lights. I also can't find the dashboard in my mobile app to try it from there.
All the videos and fourms I've found tend to gloss over the part I'm stuck at because it's simple and they focus on more interesting and difficult issues, I need someone to hold my hand and say "hey look stupid, you forgot to click this button" as I'm sure the fix is probably simple.
All of that being said, my vision for this project is to be able to have my fire tablet sit on the coffee table outside while entertaining and be able to control the music, lights, fans, see the doorbell cam, weather radar, and setup a few scenes using one of those nice streamline dashboards I see all over the internet (I was thinking SharpTools/Fully Kiosk).
Any advice and pointers would be greatly appreciated!
I'm not familiar with chrome books but I assume they use chrome as a browser... and chrome works fine. You should be able to just open Chrome, pop the IP address of your hub into the address bar, and connect - assuming you are on the same network as the hub.
I do use a bond bridge but I am using the third-party integration, which was released prior to the one written by HE. However, I'll take a stab at it. I'm confused about the two buttons - what you should have is a fan control and a light control. My fans don't have dimmable lights so not sure I can replicate that but the fan control should look like this:
It is possible to configure buttons to control the fan and the light but it's a bit more complex than just using the native fan controller.
Your vision is a good one. I might challenge you to think beyond remote control to automation - making things work without any human interaction at all. For instance, when my AC units turn on, the fans in those rooms automatically turn on as well. Or when I hop into the shower the bathroom lights come on brighter and the exhaust fan kicks on for 20 min before automatically shutting off. Or when I tell Alexa I'm going to use the hot tub, she leaves the kitchen door unlocked, locks the other doors, shuts off the motion lighting in the back yard, turns on some outdoor mood lighting, and disables person detection in the back yard.
I'm starting to think it's a settings issue and not a Chromebook issue. I found the logs from my attempts at controlling my lights and fan. Any idea what these are codes are?
@brad5 i just changed it to a button like the one you suggested, this is the error code it gave me:
app:3. 2022-10-14 06:18:34.463 PMerrorjava.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Command 'setSpeed' is not supported by device 2. on line 597 (method dashboardCmd)
I only use a Chromebook to work with my hub. Never an issue.
Assuming you are on the same network as the HE hub (not a subnetwork) you should be able to connect directly to the address the hub is using (you can identify it through the router) at http://192.168.1.xxx (even if you don't have internet connectivity.) or use portal.hubitat.com if you are connected to the net. My mesh network is seamless, so there are no separate subnetworks to worry about, this may be part of your issue.
I can do this easily from home or through my VPN connected to my home network on my phone.
