Off-topic rant about security

It’s not a good idea to have the hub in a faraday cage

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I am new to HE but not new to Home Automation I started with ST migrated to Home Assistant couldn’t deal with all the updates which improved one thing and broke twenty others also tried OpenHab, to confusing for me and then moved to Domoticz where I was using an Aeotec stick And had a solid Zwave network but had endless issues with devices being dropped on my zigbee network using a Conbee II and deconz. So I decided to try HE my unit arrived about 10 days ago and I think I have managed about 20 hours of sleep since then ( I’m obsessive).
I am having endless issues now with Z Wave
I have done all the upgrades then downgraded again, last night I upgraded to the latest update everything seemed fine now 18 hrs later nothing Z wave works again.
Sorry for the long story!!!
My question here to the community is do you have faith that the Hubitat support team will get these issues solved soon, I believe these problems are mainly due to the new Z wave chip but I am new to the platform and many of you seem like Hubitat veterans.
Your honest opinions on this might just save my sanity. Thanks

Was about to mention the "F" name, though I believe we are supposed to say "he who must not be named," or "The Scottish play," to avoid evil spirits. :wink:

Find the hub a happy place outside that box, central to the house/devices as much as possible, and your life will be one of bliss.

I was wondering that very thing. :slight_smile:

Right now, mine's a lot less fancy.

I have the top of the Hubitat Velcro'd to a plastic "electric outlet box cover" that is molly-bolted to my drywall about 6.5 feet up in the air in my house. I figured that kept the openings on the bottom free for cooling but got it up and a few feet away from the wifi router and high enough to be less directly impacted by furniture.

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Love your technical approach.

Will not be hiring you for our next home fashion design project. :wink:

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I forgot to mention that if you have the old old GE/Jasco switches, they don't report status to the hub by themeselves so you'll have to use the zwave poller app or set up one yourself so you can stagger the polling if you have a lot of the older ones.

The beauty of a good mesh network is that the birds can see out of the cage without having to be free range. I've discovered with ethernet devices that if you let one of them out of the cage, the next thing you know is that you have free range networking. We know we don't want that because next thing you know is wires will be criss-crossing in mid-air. I used to work at NASA and this happened unintentionally all too often.

Too bad there is not such a thing as a POE external Z-wave/Zigbee radio. Now that would totally rock!

There is. Just not for this platform.

Here ya go:

https://www.amazon.com/UCTRONICS-802-3af-Splitter-Ethernet-Raspberry/dp/B01MDLUSE7

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I heard a small "boom!" when that post appeared. :wink:

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Well that is a sweet device. I might just need one of those out of principle. I could use that to power the HE I presume. My real idea was to put the hub in the rack and make the Z-Wave and Zigbee radios external to the hub, but that is not a bad idea. Are you using that to power your HE?

Sure can.. And I have seen many do that.. Great for setups like yours. You can place it anywhere and still feed it off your UPS

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Think of it this way.. you don't have your wifi access points in the cage do you? The hub works on the same principles .. The metal box will strangle your Z-Wave and Zigbee mesh.

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Mines sitting upside down on top of my fridge.

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Nice... I have seen those mini dc ups devices before..

Yea, they run the hub a long time too.

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How's the antenna radiate from HE? Since the box is small and flat I would've assumed that it would be radiating up and out like this (very crudely) image
If that's the case then putting it upside-down on a metal surface is going to block a bulk of the signal.

:+1: Can confirm they work really well.. have 2.

I have 2 devices that connect at 9.6k rest are connected at 100k. I'm not worried about it. If it was an issue I would have noticed by now. It's been up there for months.