I wouldn't class 3 years as very short in the tech world
Without such an active (and generous I might add) community it wouldn't have got as far along today as it has.
No consumer HA system falls into this category. If anyone is looking for turnkey and bulletproof they really should be consulting an integrator and shelling out the $$.
The reality is that like all things a reasonable amount of homework is required to make an informed choice. Like deciding what key things you want for your home and whether these are natively supported by the potential system of your choice.
If you want the widest support OOB then probably homekit might be the way to go.
Lol - I used to wonder why ppl around me could never find solutions to their problems until I realised that many people simply don't know how to conduct an effective search for lack of knowledge of the appropriate terms to search for.
If I click Settings:Registration I get that page and contents. Now imagine I want to know more about it... What are the search terms? Wouldn't the words themselves be perfect?
"Email Linked" is a completely different result!! LOL
I'm not sure about that one, to my knowledge Alexa is by far the most widely supported platform, HK firmly coming in last of the big 3, and that does not even take into account the zigbee hub enabled models. If you want the least amount of work to make something decently nice looking though, then yeah HK is probably the way to go, but it is also the most expensive.
I also agree with the other people on this thread as well that automation is more important than a dashboard. If you have enough devices and have automated well enough, you should not have to manually turn things on and off, and I have found even when you have to, that is where voice assistants come in. That is the chief differentiator between Alexa/Google/HK and HE, it bridges everything with an infinitely flexible automation platform. If you like the frontend of HK, you can use it; if you like Alexa as a voice assistant, you can use it; if you like android TV and associated assistant, you can use it; if you like a mix Zigbee, Z-Wave, RF, and WiFi products, you can use them to control each other; if you want to write your own code to glue everything together, you can but you don't have to. But with great flexibility there usually comes great setup and decent upkeep. Something one of my college teachers used to say, "There is no free lunch," everything has its cost.
But yeah, I agree 100% with you that if you want a bulletproof system that works OOB and with the least amount of effort you are going to pay for it with a Control4, Crestron, or even higher end Lutron (RadioRA2 or HomeWorks) which are a professionally managed and integrated system.
Yeah but the good news is once you have such a system in place it just works - my HE/Node-RED combo has been completely stable over the past year or so and Homebridge as well for the past few months. Any shenanigans have been (mostly) self inflicted due to curiosity and the irresistible urge to tinker and experiment.
For my residential clients I provide the initial setup and configuration to get them started. The integration into the Apple Hub makes my life and my client's a whole lot easier/fun. They are usually happy/excited to mess around with that while I handle the core back-end automations.
Boy howdy! That explains most of the things that go wrong at my house. I would guess that would also go for the majority of people here. There is no turnkey home automation; and how could there be? Everyone has their own routines and needs as far as HA is concerned.
By the way, I don't believe I mentioned before, welcome.
I'll share my experience on this journey so far. I switched to Hubitat from Smartthings. I actually started with Echo 4th Gen including it's ZIgbee hub. I quickly learned there were far too many limitations with that and needed a hub. I moved to SmartThings, as I read it to be very user friendly (easy) and compatible with everything I thought I might need. After about one month I transitioned to Hubitat. Understand, SmartThings is a good product. It was fairly straightforward and it does have a very pretty dashboard. In short, it worked. In my case I became increasingly interested in a local, rather than cloud based system and I wanted a bit more. So, before I invested too much, I purchased Hubitat Elevation and began to learn.
I try not to have too many manufactures' products, as in my mind, keeping things together and simple reduces conflict. I have GE/Jasco/Enbrighten, EcoLink, EvoLogic, Sengled, Zooz and several Alexa devices. My preferred protocol is Zigbee, Z-wave and Wifi in that order. With these devices, my limited knowledge, leaning on the videos produced by Hubitat and this community, I have almost all the lighting in my house automated. Lights turn on and off, based on schedules, contact sensors, doors open or closing, motion or lack of, dimmers emitting various degrees of brightness, all varied by mode, time of day, day of the week and presence of family members. I also have reminders, schedules, morning greetings and briefings automated. Additionally, Alexa, coordinating with Habitat, announces family members arrival and welcomes them home with personalized greetings.
I have two dashboards. One on the computer while at home, the other mobile as the phone screen is smaller and the layout is adjusted in accordance. I rarely, almost never, use the dashboards as the system is automated and requires little to no human input. If and when human interaction is involved, we use voice via Alexa, which adds a bit of fun. I've only been involved with home automation since Nov '20 and only part of that with Hubitat.
I offer this to let you know, even a normal, regular guy like me without in-depth skill or training can enjoy a great deal of flexibility and customization with this platform. It works well for my case offering even greater power and flexibility than what I use.
I hope you find what you need.
This. I setup my node red stuff a long time ago. Before the he nodes were available. Have not changed a thing since. All my flows just keep trucking along.
So I've been reading whatever has been writing, and had many follow up questions. Spent a bit of time writing out those questions and responses.. but due to some limitation on this forum, I was unable to submit the post for 16 hours.. and all of the response is now gone..
Agreed..
I think that would be nice, to a point.. but find there might be some limitation, at least in my household as to what could or could not be automated.. or at least could be automated without to much difficulty and a long list of if/then scenarios.. Eventually I would like the ability to turn certain things on based on motion, contact sensors, events, etc.. Like the Porch light, there is a contact sensor out there, but I believe its a Wyze one? Which doesn't work with the Hubitat (at least not without a RasPi acting as a bridge, from what I've found on the forums) Or the Ring doorbell/camera that's there, would be nice to use that to turn a lamp bulb in my office green to let me know there is someone at the door, as I don't use the Ring app, since it sucks (super slow to activate the live feed.)
And then there is too much foot traffic around to have rooms turn on/off via motion control rules. We have nightlights in several of the sockets throughout the home.. so turning on a bright overhead light is not really needed to make ones way to the toilet in the middle of the night. And then I tried the whole motion sensor in the bathroom thing, but the light kept going out while someone was in the shower, as the motion sensor got screwed up by the moisture/fog and not being able to see the person behind the shower curtain..
I think as far as lights go, automation has its limits.. unless I guess if you have a bunch of random unnecessary gadgets to control. Like RGB lights behind a TV? never understood the purpose of those but to each their own.
I'll have to check into this HomeBridge, as we all have iOS/MacOS devices, as well has a couple Ring products, well just the doorbell cam, and the flood lights (which have not been installed yet.) I do like the look of the Apple Home UI, and its basically baked into iOS already..
Might take a look at those videos, if you have not yet. They don't go into detail about much, and certainly don't to well of a job explaining what they do touch on briefly.. Also I clicked a button to add some fake virtual switch to try out. and it never created them (or installed the couple things it said it was going to..) app tab was completely empty..
What about the Devices tab? A virtual switch is a device. Or did you already have devices of that type - in which case, the virtual devices will not be created.
I agree the Ring doorbell is disappointing. Mine is a Ring 2020. "live feed" is so slow whoever rang the bell has left and having lunch somewhere before it comes on-line. That's all on Ring.
I do however have my doorbell integrated with Alexa, and Alexa to Hubitat. So that, when there is motion at the front door, it triggers a routine in Alexa that tells Hubitat to turn on the porch light. It works quick enough that the light is on before the person reaches the door. You could just as easily turn on any light, switch bulb, whatever...
I was looking at these last night, and checking the compatibility list for Hubitat, it only mentions the Pro bridge is supported, does this mean the none-pro won't work? I found a starter pack on amazon for a decent price, almost bought it until I saw the Pro vs non-pro issue..
I wish they had just a standard looking light switch, instead of the ones with the on/off/brighten/dim functions. I'm not to interested in the dim function..
Also kinda wish I knew about these before spending $350 on Sengled SmartBulbs (40 Bulbs in total).. Is there something available that I could cover the dummy switch on the way, to prevent people from turning off the power, but use the smart switch to control the Sengled Bulbs? I noticed the Lutron Aurora but this seems to be for the Hue Bulbs (or at least its advertise as being only for that, requires a Hue hub as well) - and read a few posts on this forum that they are cumbersome if not used with the Hue Hub. Is there another product floating out there similar to this.. I've only heard of like 0.5% of the product manufactures on the compatibility list for hubitat
From what I read about the Lurtron stuff, its more for controlling dumb bulbs with a smart switch.. This would be good in say our Kitchen, which has a large florescent light fixture. Or in the 2 bathrooms where the light fixture over the sinks/mirrors have 6 (circular) Edison style bulbs.
Also looked at Innovelli per the suggest, but again these seem more for controlling dumb bulbs.. which would have been great if I had not already bought all these smart bulbs..
All the tabs were empty.. and I had yet to add any bulbs to the hubitat.. in fact, none of the new bulbs were even in the light fixtures when I start playing with the hub.. I went room by room installing the bulbs as I added them to the hubitat after figuring out how to do so..
At first I had built a whole batch of dashboards for each room, etc. but after thinking things over and before buying tablets to mount on the wall, I started thinking of ways to not have them (and spend that money on sensors and other zigbee/zwave devices)
One thing I do instead of having a dashboard, is I use the capability of the Inovelli Red dimmers/switches and use the scene buttons (double tab / triple tap, etc) for those odd ball times I can't do it via automation. One example is when I don't want motion to trigger lights in a certain room like when we watch a movie, I just triple tab the down button and this stops all motion lighting in that room, triple tab the top one and it's back to automatic (or some have a delay to reset). Double taps will usually make sure they stay on even if no motion is detected. etc.
Heck I even have an switch that is not even connected to a load and is only used for scene control.
EDIT: And also I use those same switches to display status of things via the LED bar on the right of the switch.
This all I have so far.. guess its a start.. still trying to figure out how the Rules/Automation works, but kinda hit a dumb there as TV is not reporting power status
But these wouldn't be effective to use if I already have smart bulbs in those light fixtures correct? As the Inovellie switch would end up powering off the smart bulb, and then the smart bulb would not be controllable on its own anymore.. at least that's how my brain is looking at it..
So do we and this was one of the main reasons for switching to Hubitat. Forget Dashboards, Apple Home is much nicer to setup and use. I use @tonesto7 ‘s Homebridge-Hubitat-Tonesto7 plugin for Homebridge and the Homebridge-v2 app for Hubitat. You do need an Apple TV, or Homepod/Homepod mini, or iPad setup as the Home Hub, and a Raspberry Pi, or Windows, or Mac to run Homebridge. Then you can also use your iPhone’s built in geolocation for presence.
The newer Zooz (and I guess iNovelli) zwave switches can disengage the physical relay from the paddle. So you can have a smart switch controlling a smart bulb!
Inovelli can be used with smart bulbs, there's an option so that power is always on the bulb even if you push the paddles (up or down). Then you only need to make an automation to turn on the light(s) when the up button is pressed once, etc.
When you need to work on the electrical part of a socket, there is an air gap plug you can remove than will remove power to the socket.
, mqtt, node-red, tasmota, grafana (still working on that one), deconz/zigbee2mqtt, homebridge, hue etc
