New Hubitat user here and just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to the community:
- Thanks to those of you who already asked the question I needed answered!
- Thanks to those of you answering those questions!
- Thanks especially to those of you who put in the (often thankless) work of running and moderating the forums, and of writing/maintaining drivers, apps, and integrations.
I moved into a new house in October, which gave me a greenfield opportunity to set things up completely from scratch. I was using SmartThings at the old house and switched in the new house to Hubitat as the primary owner of all the devices and automations. I kept the SmartThings hub because the wife is used to the app, and we have Samsung appliances which (I believe) I can't enroll in Hubitat. One of my first projects was to set up Mira to expose to the Smartthings app all of the devices she cares about. So now we can see door and lock status, control lights, and get notifications about laundry same as before.
Since then I've learned about drivers, custom apps, firmware updates, Z-Stick for ghost removal, and dug into Room Lighting and Rule Machine. We now have dusk-to-dawn lighting automation, some halfway decent scenes, and auto-locking doors. Still working on the bathroom fan humidity automation but that's more of a hardware issue. (My Zooz QSensors report consistently high and widely differing humidity and temp. Grrr!)
My best achievement so far is figuring out how to use hold/release on the Inovelli 2-in-1 switch to position the shades. In the first iteration we could open or close the shades but getting them to any other position required the remote (wife) or telling the robot to set them to a percent (me). That required setting each shade individually so I always considered it a workaround.
Now, thanks to reading threads here, we can hold the switch button until the shades get to about the right position and then release. While this was huge, it introduced a new problem - due to inherent latency in the signaling, shades in a group ended up in slightly different positions.
(Aside: My wife mocks me for installing a spirit level app in my phone for the express purpose of straightening pictures in the doctor's offices. From my perspective, this function singlehandedly justifies the existence of smart phones. The uneven shades were annoying me to a similar degree.)
This morning I found a thread explaining how to set a variable from a device attribute. Based on that I was able not only to make a group of shades sync up, but I also set the LED bar in the switch to show the shade level. Now, the first wall switch in the group sets the light level using the dimmer paddle, and the second sets the shade position in exactly the same way as we dim the lights.
Fresh on the heels of that accomplishment, I just wanted to say thanks - for the technical help sure, but mainly for the degree to which I was able to impress my wife with that shade dimmer automation. She now thinks I'm a genius and I haven't yet told her it's really you all. That'll be our secret, yeah?
About the best, most helpful/useful and fun forum I've ever been in.
