I have been on the C7 for a while now, and I came from the SmartThings mess. I migrated to C8 last week without too much issue, But I have to comment that the migration didn't come without pain at least the Zigbee part. I don't have a lot of zigbee devices some older Smartthings motion devices a few contact sensors, All of those moved no issue. Aqara was a nightmare, still don't work put them back on C7 as a mess hub. Hue has been very finicky this has been hit or miss.
I hate to see so many people having issues with Zigbee on the C8 it gives me nightmares of the Smarthings debacle.
I also realize new devices need some real world time to work out the bugs. However I think this should have been realized before the release of the C8 in this case, the Zigbee is a main stay in a lot of devices for a lot of people and they are really getting frustrated as I read the posts.
Home automation is not really easy to implement, you have to have some real patience and time to fix all the things that don't work. For most DYI folks might be ok, but for the general public I say no way.
Hubitat folks are doing all they can, I am sure, however please be aware that the fait of the platform is in their ability to make sure these new devices work well before release. its to hard for most folks to spend hours fixing what worked on the older devices.
Not to trivialize the situation, but what you are seeing is that (my estimate) 2-5% of the total people migrating are having issues, and the Hubitat team are working hard in the background to identify the patterns and release fixes. Much of this work is being done where we can't see it, and when we can see it, it generally hits the Beta test group a couple of iterations before it goes to the GA channel.
In the C-8's case, the internal testing was extended, and then it was put into Beta for a couple of months where additional situations were discovered and fixed before it went public. Unfortunately every installation is unique and it is impossible to hit every possible combination with pre-release testing.
Interesting observation. I started with a C5 and I am still on the C5, zwave, zigbee, Lutron has always worked well for me. I remember when the C7 came out, there was major problems with zwave, many considered it to be a problem with the new 7 series zwave chip (stack?) inside the C7, as opposed to deficiencies in other parts of the C7. Regardless, many users had major difficulty with their zwave implementations and there was much discussion about zigbee being the better protocol since it was not having these problems on the C7. Now it looks like a similar thing is happening with the C8, but instead of zwave it is zigbee. Hope it all gets straightned out.
I guess it will be Lutrons turn on the future C9, LOL.
If the problem is related to the new Zigbee version, it may be difficult for Hubitat to prove there are problems (to Silicon Labs) without some real world user experiences.
Be glad you missed all the fun when Silicon Labs released the new SDK for Z-Wave.
Understood and appreciated ! and keep working on it I have faith Hubitat will get through it. Spent a lot of time trying to get things working again, and it has been frustrating. Not my first time with these things, SmartThings was a constant pain in the butt. Don't want to go back to that again.
Keep up the good work and I have faith you will get to the bottom of the issues. On a positive note my Zwave is screaming fast these days happy about that.
It appears that two other Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 chipset sticks are having similar issues. Home Assistant SkyConnect and Sonoff Dongle E both use the same chipset as Hubitat. Within the Home Assistant forum you will see similar Zigbee issues keeping devices paired that Hubitat users are having. Go Silicon Labs!
It is my understanding that the C8 hub went through several months of trials in the hands of experienced users before release. Anytime a new device is released, there will always be issues as there can never be enough beta testers to detect every possible problem. Typically, those who decide to be early adopters of a new hardware platform are those with sufficient knowledge and patience to deal with the issues. Hubitat could have waited another six months before releasing the C8, but that is unlikely to have reduced the number of issues significantly.
I do not believe Hubitat released the C8 too soon, but you will have to decide if YOU decided to migrate too soon. Many people who are concerned about migration issues will wait a few months after release before they decide to risk migration. That will allow many issue to be resolved, but it does not guarantee you won't encounter an issue.
While I did have a few minor issues with migrating from the C7 to the C8, none were so severe that I regretted upgrading.
The same thing can happen with other devices. I once had a company leased car that was a newly released model. The vehicle had three recalls in the first year, including one major recall that prevented me from using the vehicle for 2-3 months. Fortunately, the car company provided a rental during that time while they developed a plan for remediation. Thus, I am leery about purchasing any new vehicle in its first year of model release. I wait until the bugs are worked out of the design.
The same type of thing happened with the Boing 737 MAX software issues that grounded the planes for nearly two years while the software was rewritten. I have a friend who is trained as a captain on the 737 Max. He said he had absolutely no concerns flying the aircraft as he has the training and experience to deal with potential issues. It was two pilots in 3rd world countries that did not have sufficient training and experience to deal with the issues, unfortunately resulting in fatal crashes..
Since the Hubitat Elevation hubs are not recommended for critical applications such as home security, a potential failure does not come with the same risks as a critical failure in a motor vehicle or aircraft.
Like @maranoal, I am glad that Lutron Caseta devices can still work even if the Hubitat hub and the Lutron Pro bridge goes offline.
Released too soon....? Or you decided to upgrade too soon?
What was the desperate need for an immediate migration from C7 to C8? Was C7 not working for you?
Teething problems are to be expected with the first major update to hardware in almost 3 years and the debut of brand new radios/firmwares.
I'll wait until things settle down before upgrading. I've not even taken a C7 firmware update since C8 was released. Too much change. C7 works perfect for me.... "if it ain't broken don't "fix" it"
I don't think you can criticise the Hubitat team. There are always risks with being an early adopter. You need to weigh those risks against the benefits that the new features brings to you.
Yep got caught up in the hype and I should know better. I am not criticizing the Hubitat folks it's my observation. The good of it is that my Zwave is working better on C8 than C7 that was what I was hoping for.
Good observation you should wait to upgrade, no question.
Iām one of the lucky ones that have had no serious issues with migrating one of my C-5 hubs to the C-8. I had one zigbee device drop off right after the switch (of >90 Zigbee devices) and none since. I manually migrated my z-wave devices from another C-5 and they are working so much better that I even added a few ring motion sensors that were so problematic before that I had decommissioned them and they are also working great now. As for Hue sensors and button devices; they were always finicky on my C-5 and for whatever reason they are working perfectly on my C-8, so go figure.
IT companies like Hubitat, that build products to integrate with 3rd party products, are in a no-win situation.
Don't support every Tom, Dick, and Harry device that came from a whitelabeling Chinese factory? Oh, you're not compatible.
Add support for new devices and chipsets as soon as possible? Oh, you're buggy.
Remember the thing about only upgrading to a new version of Windows when it's a .1 release? That's because Microsoft has to support EVERYONE. They literally have code in new versions of Windows to ensure that versions of Photoshop from 25 years ago can still run. And what does it cost to maintain that level of compatibility? Literally billions. And it still isn't perfect.
What you see online is the small percentage who have problems. If you don't want to take a chance on being one of them, it's okay to slow your upgrades a bit. My lights turn on just fine with my C7. I'll get a C8 at some point and migrate some things over. The world keeps spinning.
Not trying to downplay the less than optimal experience that some users had to go through. We've posted a warning early on when incidents related to Zigbee migration started to come through. Our engineers have been working to resolve these issues, although some incidents are still under investigation.
However, Aqara devices in particular, have not been tested by our engineers on the C-8 (or any Hubitat Elevation hub for that matter), as they have been problematic on all Hubitat Elevation models in part due to their use of some non-standard Zigbee extensions. We were hoping that the new Zigbee 3.0 in the Hubitat Elevation C-8 will be able to handle these devices better, but based on the increased number of reports that we are seeing, these devices perform even worse on the C-8 than previous models.
No problem sorry that Aqara is less useable on C8, I have used the C7 and a Mesh with those devices and they're working fine now. It's really unfortunate that they are so temperamental on the Hubitat platform they are a good value otherwise. So interesting enough I have a new Aqara P1 motion sensor and it works very well on the C8. Go figure, but the older Aqara's no go.
I do think telling everyone that comes to the forum looking for help w/the C8 that they should have "known better" than to purchase a new release of a product is a bit of a step too far. For tech geeks/folks like us who have been hanging out here and especially those who have been through the C7 intro, yes, we should know better. (Yet I still updated immediately! ) But for others I think that's asking a bit much.
When you come to the Hubitat site the C-8 is identified as the hot new kid on the block ready to automate. Especially w/the sexy new antennas on the C-8, the chance that new users would choose the C7 instead w/out some very direct advice seems pretty small. I don't think we should expect all of HE customers to get that they should wait (and for how long?) or purchase "old" versions of the hub that aren't as good, "because their old," right? We've been taught by marketing (and our friends showing off new stuff) to believe that "Just released" means the best, not the most dangerous. Look at all the people who grab the newest release of their preferred phone the second it hits the stores.
I'm not saying HE is doing anything wrong in their release timing or marketing of the C-8, but I'm also saying that every customer who purchases the C8 and expects it to "just work" isn't doing anything wrong, either.
And we need to remember that the C8 issues aren't just a bunch of odd edge cases of off-brand devices and smaller "annoyance" problems. The issues a subset of customers are dealing with are fundamental and for some quite debilitating - entire Zigbee mesh down repeatedly and sometimes won't come back up, smaller set of Z-Wave mesh problems, devices falling off the mesh repeatedly, working setups on their C5 or C7 failing on the C8. And the devices aren't odd-ball stuff - Hue motion sensors, Iris motion sensors, Sengled bulbs, Third Reality plugs - all officially supported by HE.
So I don't think we should be telling anyone who shows up here w/C-8 issues that it's their fault, they should have known better not to update or not to buy a C-8 to start their home automation. That's just too broad a brush and a bit harsh, IMHO.
) But for others I think that's asking a bit much.
We've been taught by marketing (and our friends showing off new stuff) to believe that "Just released" means the best, not the most dangerous. Look at all the people who grab the newest release of their preferred phone the second it hits the stores.
