SmartThings to HE known issues?

⚙️ Custom Apps and Drivers webCore
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Hi,

I'm considering moving from ST to HE and trying to assess if the migration is possible.

From the looks of it, the level of support for the following devices & smartapps is comparable and they should migrate with no issues (let me know if I'm mistaken):

  • Generic Z-wave and Zigbee devices: light switches, dimmers, motion & contact sensors, sirens, etc.
  • Schlage Z-wave locks
  • MyQ garage door with IFTTT integration on virtual switches for open/closed state.
  • Life360 for geofencing
  • Echo Speaks
  • Sonos
  • WebCORE. Is there a doc for feature parity? Using features such as WOL, IFTTT Maker, notifications, echo speaks & Sonos integration, etc.

It looks like these aren't supported or not well supported? Let me know if I'm mistaken? Should I just use HubConnect for these?:

  • Honeywell WiFi thermostat
  • Awair
  • Samsung TV (on LAN)
  • Yamaha receivers (post about it says support has been withdrawn)

Finally trying to understand how the Alexa integration works.

  1. My setup has a number of virtual switches that are used e.g. in WebCORE pistons for state changes or to trigger actions. Will this work? Some posts mention issues with virtual switches, but it's hard to tell if these issues still exist today
  2. The echo devices and the HE hub will be on different networks: my IoT WiFi devices are on a guest network (can't see any other local devices, only Internet) to prevent having them expose my LAN to worms & viruses. That includes Wyze, Alexa, etc. It looks like HE-Alexa integration requires the hub and echo devices to be on the same network but couldn't confirm. Is this the case? Is there a workaround? Since Alexa devices need to go to cloud anyway for ASR & NLU, I'm too not concerned about latencies.

Also, there are mentions of needing to add additional hubs to handle load. Coming from the auto-scale cloud mindset, I'm having a hard time figuring out:

  • What is the criteria for deciding additional hubs are needed? Number of devices, number of tasks, other? I have ~50 z wave devices, a few zigbee, ~40 WiFi (Sonos, Alexa, Wyze, ...) and ~20 virtual.
  • How does the load distribution work? Do hubs auto-pick devices/tasks or do these need to be manually assigned?
  • Are there gotchas? Such as hubs competing on radio frequencies or broadcasts on LAN?

Finally, any other thing someone that's been using ST for years should be looking out for when moving to HE?

(sorry for making such a long post)

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You will need beaming repeaters near the locks to make them work reliably. You will need a real contact switch to monitor open/closed for the MyQ Lite garage door handler.

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There is a custom driver for Honeywell WiFi. I've installed and used it myself. I'll try to find it and provide a link.

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I'm almost positive this is the drive I installed. GitHub - HubitatCommunity/HoneywellThermo-TCC

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@nh.schottfam documented a lot of the differences and best practices in this link...

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Hubitat's Alexa Skill supports Alexa having the ability to control Hubitat Switches, Dimmers, RGBW bulbs, Thermostats, Windows Shades, and Fan Controllers. In addition, Alexa Routines can be triggered by Hubitat Motion and Contact sensors. Alexa can also report the temperature values reported by various Hubitat sensors.

You can also select which Hubitat devices are exposed to Alexa

When using only the Hubitat Alexa Skill, I don't see where having the Echos and Hubitat on different LAN's will matter. Running Echo Speaks should not matter either, as I believe it only talks to the Amazon Cloud. @tonesto7 would know for sure.

NOTE: Hubitat actually supports two unique Amazon Echo integrations. The original one, the "Amazon Echo App", made the Hubitat hub emulate a Philips Hue bridge. This integration is deprecated, as it can only handle switches and dimmers. I bring this up because I believe in this case, the Echo devices would need to be on the same LAN as the Hubitat hub for LAN-based discovery to work.

The second Echo integration is the "Amazon Echo Skill", which is installed via the Amazon Alexa App on your mobile phone. This is a true Amazon Alexa Home Automation Skill. This skill utilizes cloud to cloud integration, and thus I believe would not care if your Echo devices are on the same LAN or not.

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Specific supported device hardware can be found in the following wiki's:

Officially Supported
https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=List_of_Compatible_Devices
Community Drivers

I use a Schlage myself and haven't missed a lock or unlock once.

MyQ add a contact/tilt sensor and you're good. I don't think their app supplies access to the internal contact sensor or something along those lines.

Life360 for geofencing works, you can also combine presence devices/sensors for redundancy.

Echo speaks

A lot of users here use Sonos fine.

WebCORE

Honeywell Wifi Thermostat I have two and use HubConnect with ST and it works fine with no API limitations that I've found so far. I may change it to local HE hub at some point but right now it isn't giving me any problems.

Samsung TV integrations even on ST are garbage. I have Samsung TV's from all of the last 6 years and they all have little quirks. I left them on ST for now and use HubConnect for these. All of them have the LAN disconnect bug and changing them to wifi helps but if the TV is off for a few days they will drop off too. One of the 2017 model's has a "SmartHub" that the screen connects to and reboot it daily to keep the hub from misbehaving. A couple of the other ones I have to reset occasionally by holding the power button on the remote until it reboots to get it be seen on the network as well as to enable the firmware update option.

Not sure about Yamaha receivers but if you have a DTH for it in SmartThings someone can probably convert it pretty easy.

I have about 150 devices and a single hub. With your setup you should be fine. Some people have multiple hubs because they have separate floors and want best possible signal on each floor, others use it to segregate bad-actor devices (some wifi bulbs come to mind here) so they don't route other devices through them. Sometimes users will find an app they want to use but it consumes a lot of resources for whatever reason and for performance reasons choose to add a hub to split up the workload.

If you run multiple hubs there are several ways to connect them all with their own ways of working but in general try to keep local processing with local devices to that hub and then have global rules that span the devices as needed. Each hub acts as it's own controller.

Most radio frequency interference issues are on the Zigbee side. Just pick a channel that is fairly clear and you should be fine. Usually 20 or 25 is the preferred channel. Avoid 26 it has some limitations.

Keep your ST hub in case you want to do OTA firmware updates in the future for any ST devices.

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Everything runs locally on the hub (not seemingly infinite resources of cloud computing), so keep rules as simple as possible. If that means making several rules instead of one complicated one, so be it. Rules don't use any resources just sitting there.
Also, this means all custom code and drivers are local as well, which translates to much faster response (especially noticeable with TP-Link devices which respond instantaneously thanks to @djgutheinz TP-Link integration).

Old non-plus devices don't report state change back to the hub without polling. Polling puts a large burden on the z-wave network and isn't something that is automatically done on Hubitat. It can be set up, but should be limited to only the devices that are absolutely necessary to have a state update. Best to replace them with z-wave plus or zigbee.

Unlike SmartThings, the Zigbee radio channel is selectable on HE.

I have used this on both platforms and think it runs much better/faster on HE. It's also nice (when messing with my kids) to have a device page with all the commands at your fingertips instead of having to create a rule for anything you want it to say.

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Does HE support creating custom switch+contact sensors? If so, a trick similar to this one could be considered as long as the MyQ + IFFFT integration remains free.

They currently work reliably with ST. Should I anticipate changes?

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Ah, that's probably from posts mentioning the deprecated integration that I got the impression same LAN was required. Thanks for the thorough explanation!

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You're migrating, right? So you disassemble the existing ST Mesh, making it worse with each Exclude... then you're Including to a new Mesh, maybe building it well, maybe not. One thing you can predict though, is the new mesh will NOT work like the old one :smiley:

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Sadly most of my z-wave devices predate z-wave+ and replacing 40 light switches costing $40 each may prove too much of a challenge to justify to my better half. Do we know what pooling scheme ST uses? Is it constant and uniform or does it vary based on device type/brand/state ? Will enabling a similar scheme on HE be too much for the hub to handle?

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Yes, agree. Shouldn't have included the TVs in the list as they are trouble anyway. I ended up using regular WOL to wake them up.

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Thanks everyone for the thorough answers! I didn't expect such an active and helpful community. They confirmed the viability of migrating my setup from ST to HE.

Just waiting a little for the prices to go down before making the plunge as the HE hub went from $80 mid-April to $150 in September.

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I thought the "Repair Z-wave network" was supposed to take care of this (by having each node figure out shortest/fastest path to hub and saving outcome it in its routing table). Isn't it the case?

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Probably not, but z-wave, especially non-plus, is slow (down to 9.6kb/sec) and there is only so much bandwidth to go around. Plus, very little actually runs on the SmartThings hub as I remember the only things that worked then SmartThings’ cloud went down were my motion automations. I would just suggest polling what you find necessary and slowly replacing it with z-wave plus or the new GE Enbrighten Zigbee 3.0 dimmers.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the price to drop. The new hub is the first to use the z-wave 700 controller.

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Zwave plus devices auto repair. You would really only do that for regular zwave devices. You will get to a tipping point at some point though where the old mesh is really struggling if you have them scattered about the house. Cut your house into 4 cubes or whatever makes sense and migrate all those devices so one lone device isn't having trouble connecting to other stuff. If your old hub is in the middle of your house migrate the left side and leave the right. The idea is you want to build out from the hub and pickup all the devices out to the edge so there aren't gaps. If you live in a tiny house without much obstructions it probably wont matter. Try to have a device every 30 feet or so for a reliable path. You may not always have a device to put there and that's ok just don't cherry pick from all over.

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The $80 was for the C5. The C7 won't be dropping anytime soon, but they might send you a coupon code if you ask nicely.

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I added my lock (BE469) last, after everything else was in place on HE and working well. Just like with SmartThings I had the hub near the lock to pair. It paired easily and works as well as it did in SmartThings, no issues at all.

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Got it. HE hub ordered. Thanks again everyone for the help!

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