Early History of Hubitat
After the release of Rule Machine on SmartThings in the fall of 2015, the stability of the SmartThings platform became shaky. It had never been all that stable to begin with, but at one point application state started randomly vanishing, and scheduling collapsed. @bravenel had been outspoken in the SmartThings community about these problems, and critical about the cloud-based architecture for home automation. During this period, @bravenel was the most prolific poster in the SmartThings community, and hence was quite visible. At one point, SmartThings technical support started blaming Rule Machine for the platform problems they were experiencing.
In early 2016 these issues became quite problematic, and I was convinced that the cloud issues would never be resolved satisfactorily. I thought seriously about the possibility of starting a company to build a local hub, but knew that I lacked many of the necessary skills to do so. By the end of January, I had talked myself out of it. Then, on February 2, 2016 I received a note from @chuck.schwer, who suggested that he thought building a local hub was very doable, and asked if I'd be interested. Our Slack channel was created that day, and we began working on our new project.
It would be almost two years later that Hubitat Elevation was launched. Needless to say, a great deal transpired in those two years. The name Hubitat was proposed by my wife Ellen. Hubitat Environmental, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on October 16, 2016, and would later change its name to Hubitat, Inc. Chuck went to work full time for the company at the beginning of 2017, and Mike followed 6 months later. My house was transitioned from ST to Hubitat early in 2017, and ran as a connected ST/Hubitat system for a few months as we filled in needed drivers, using a precursor to Hub Link. The hub supported a Lutron integration from the very beginning. We had alpha testers in first quarter 2017, using an X86 based hub. Later we would change to ARM Cortex based hubs.
