Spent a whole day researching the history.. Googling, reading old forum posts, looking at archived websites and old githubs.. I came up short.. I missing a huge chunk of the story..
I can usually find all this when researching a company’s past... one day they got fed up.. And then they all disappeared and then one day hubitat existed..
I even found the old shipping information when the units arrived in the US.. But not the genesis story
That might be a cool topic for Hubitat Live @Pete. Not sure how much they would be willing to share but there could be some interesting content. Maybe they could get a cameo appearance of @patrick.
How did you almost burn down your house?
I wonder if that could be one of the causes for some users reported slow downs? Mice in a hub are never a good thing. 
My wager is that it had something to do with a 0.1uF capacitor installed between phases in the breaker box, but I'm just guessing. 
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.
Thanks for the little history lesson.
Nice.. Would love to hear more about the development process during that 2 years (which is the gap in my research)...
The challenges / decisions / processes / etc.. Would make a great story..
If y’all are willing to share.. I know some things would have to be omitted for intellectual property protection..
In my semi-finished attic, I had a huge exhaust fan. There were curtain walls over the eaves, with access ports here and there. The fan was wired to a timer switch at the bottom of the attic stairwell, and the wiring was accessible in one of the triangular eave spaces. I simply cut the wire, added an outlet box on the supply side and a plug on the fan side. I plugged an X-10 relay module into the outlet and plugged the fan into the module. So far, so good.
But, apparently, either the X-10 relay module was defective or the inductive load of the very large fan motor was too great and, one day in the early 1980s, whilst the fan was running, my practice wife and I smelled smoke. I ran upstairs to find the relay "releasing the shmoo," as AvE (do you know AvE?) would put it. Happily, I got there in time to save the house, but should the new owner of the house look, now, he'd find a bit of char on the stud to which I'd mounted the electrical box.
Jeff
What is a practice wife?!!
I guess some call them X-Wifes... hehe
The one who divorced me in 1985!
Practice wife is good :), but in Oklahoma we call them the Plaintiff!
And some would just call them smart.
AvE is my favorite YouTube channel.
I can't tell you how long I have been trying to picture what he actually looks like.
@bravenel @chuck.schwer At some point the thought "wait... I think this is going to work" had to cross your minds. That had to be a fun day. Albiet non-stop ever since.
@Gnant you must have a story to tell as well. With @bravenel's story, it was all new to me since I was not a part of the Smartthings crowd. I have watched tidbits of your story unfold here but perhaps you could do some fill in.
What I am reading here demonstrates the difference that makes Hubitat such a usable system. I was involved a bit with Iris and it used to bother the hell out of me that they hired coders that were not users or HA enthusiast. They would just code based on what they were told and not based on knowing why and what they were really trying to accomplish. It was a disaster and they failed spectacularly.
It is pretty easy to tell when devices or services lack passion. I love the passion here from all the crew and the community members (except maybe a few)
Download the Hubitat app
